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BY 

JOHN A. HUTTON 



At Close Quarters 

Addresses. 12mo, cloth, net $1.25. 

Dr. Hutton is so well known now on this side of 
the water through his lectures at the Northfield 
Summer Conference that this new book of his will 
be sure of a warm welcome . The s ame clear reason- 
ing, magnetism of personal conviction and charm 
of style which characterized the author's earlier 
work "The Authority and Person of Our Lord," 
are to be found in this volume of his addresses. 



The Authority and Person of Our Lord 

12mo, cloth, net $ .50. 

"The author has kept abreast of the literature 
of his subject and knows that the older forms of 
preaching the deity of Jesus Christ need recasting 
in the terms of present-day philosophical and psy- 
chological terminology. It is one of the most 
helpful presentations that have been made of this 
important subject." — Continent 



AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



BY THE REV. 

JOHN A. HUTTON, M.A. 

M 

AUTHOR OF "THE FEAR OF THINGS," "THE AUTHORITY AND PERSON OF 
OUR LORD," "THE SOUL'S TRIUMPHANT WAY " 




New York Chicago Toronto 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



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Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 




CONTENTS 



I. THE INJURY FROM LOWER APPROVALS . . 9 

"How can ye believe, which receive honour one of 
another . . . ? " S. John v : 44. 

II. THE LOSS OF INFLUENCE 16 

"But he (Lot) seemed unto his sons-in-law as one that 
mocked." Gen. xix : 14, R.V. 

III. ENVY UNDER THE GUISE OF ZEAL . . 25 

" And the disciples of John and of the Pharisees used to 
fast : and they come and say unto Him, Why do the 
disciples of John and of the Pharisees fast, but Thy 
disciples fast not ? And Jesus said unto them, . . . 
The days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken 
away from them, and then shall they fast in those days." 
S. Mark ii ; 18-20 ; S. Matt, ix : 14, 15 ; S. Luke v : 33-35. 

IV. HOW CAN SATAN CAST OUT SATAN? . . 36 
' 4 How can Satan cast out Satan ? " S. Mark iii : 23. 

V. THE KNOWLEDGE OF CHRIST AS RISEN . 45 

"Him God raised up the third day, and shewed Him 
openly ; not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen 
before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with 
Him after He rose from the dead." Acts x : 40, 41. 

VI. THE PEACE OF GOD,— THE ESCAPE FROM 

ANXIETY 56 " 

" In nothing be anxious ; but in everything by prayer 
and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be 
made known unto God. And the peace of God which 
passeth all understanding shall guard your hearts and 
thoughts in Christ Jesus." Philippians iv : 6, 7. 

VII. THE SIN OF CAUSING OTHERS TO SIN . 68 

" Woe unto the world because of offences: for it must 
needs be that offences come . but woe to that," etc. S. 
Matt, xviii : 7. 



5 



6 



CONTENTS 



VIII. THE BLESSEDNESS OF MORAL SORROW . 78 
"My sin is ever before me." Psalm li : 3. 

IX. ENTERING INTO LIFE MAIMED ... 91 

"It is better for thee to enter into life maimed." S. 
Mark ix : 43. 

X. THE SHAME OF BEING NEUTRAL . . .101 

" Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, 
Who is on the Lord's side ? " Exodus xxxii : 26. 

XI. THE GRACE OF GOD IN SPECIAL MOMENTS 

OF OUR LIFE 112 

" Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while 
ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you. . . . 
While ye have light, believe in the light. . . . These 
things spake Jesus, and departed." S. John xii : 35, 36. 

XII. THE WISDOM OF VOWS 125 

" I will lift up mine eyes." Ps. cxxi : 1. 

XIII. THE ONE ABSOLUTE VOW . . . .133 

" My heart shall not reproach me so long as I live." 
Job xxvii : 6. 

XIV. HOW A MAN MAY FALL FROM HIS OWN 

STEDFASTNESS 140 

" Ye therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things 
before, beware lest ye also, being led away with the 
error of the wicked, fall from your own stedfastness." 
H. Peter iii : 17. 

|^ XV. A LIKELY ENOUGH STORY . . . .149 

" Demas hath forsaken us, having loved this present 
world." II. Timothy iv : 10. 

XVI. THE CHURCH OF THE FIRST DAYS THE 

STANDARD FOR ALL TIME . . . .161 

"And the Lord added to the Church daily such as 
should be saved." Acts ii ; 47. 



CONTENTS 7 

XVII. NOT PEACE, BUT A SWORD . . . .172 

" Think not that I came to send peace on the earth : I 
came not to send peace, but a sword." S. Matt, x : 84. 

XVIII. THE TRUE WAY NARROW RATHER THAN 
DIFFICULT 181 

" Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth 
unto life : and there be few that find it." S. Matt, 
vii: 14. 

XIX. LIFE, IN ITS LONG RUN, THE JUSTIFICA- 

TION OF GOD'S WAYS 190 

" Now I would have you know, brethren, that the 
things which happened unto me have fallen out rather 
unto the progress of the Gospel." Philippians i : 12. 

XX. THE FOOLISHNESS OF PREACHING . . 201 
" The foolishness of preaching." I. Cor. i : 21. ' 

XXI. THE FAITH OF GOD 212 

" Thy walls are continually before me." Isa. xlix : 16. 

XXII. THE TENDENCY TO FAINT . . . .223 
" Wherefore we faint not." II. Cor. iv : 16, R.V. 

XXIII. THE CURE OF THE QUESTIONING SPIRIT 286 

" And no man after that durst ask Him any question." 
S. Mark xii : 84. 

XXIV. THE RELATION BETWEEN THE LIFE WE 

LEAD AND THE FAITH WE HOLD . . 246 

" Holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord." 
Hebrews xii : 14. 



I 



THE INJURY FEOM LOWER APPROVALS 

"How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another 
. . . V S. Johnv: 44. 

THIS is one of the hard sayings of Jesus. 
For surely there is nothing more natural 
to us, as human beings who wish to live com- 
fortably with one another, than the daily habit- 
ual exchange of kind and appreciative words. 
Surely it is a great part of our duty in the world 
to say kind things, and to do kind things. 
Surely kindness is itself the very cause of God 
in the world, so that if everybody were always 
kind, — kind in behaviour, in speech, in judg- 
ment, pouring out love upon one another, surely 
the kingdom of God would have already come! 
And yet here our Lord seems to be putting us on 
guard, not indeed against offering our praise or 
appreciation to others, but against accepting it 
from others for ourselves. 

Now we may be perfectly sure that whatever 
was our Lord's intention in these words, it was 
never His wish that any words of His should 
reduce the amount of natural good-feeling in the 
world. Everything that was natural, spon- 

9 



10 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



taneous, the genuine flow of real feeling, our 
Lord warmly approved. He chose a child and 
pointed to a child as the type of the citizen of 
heaven. 

It would be against our whole sense of Christ 
to suppose that He would say anything to re- 
strain the flow of human kindness, or to check 
the natural instinct of simple and loving souls 
to say out what they feel in the way of grati- 
tude or appreciation. "We know how, on at least 
one occasion, He Himself was vexed and sad- 
dened for a moment, to find that of the ten men 
whom He had cleansed of leprosy, only one came 
back to thank Him. If there is one thing more 
certain than another as to the influence which 
the religion of Christ is designed to have upon 
us, it is that it should make us more open, more 
hearty and unrestrained in the loving things we 
say to one another, in the generous judgments 
we pass upon one another, not measuring our 
expressions in any nice balance lest we go be- 
yond some pedantic justification, but giving 
what we have to give, full measure, pressed 
down, running over. 

Well, but if that is so, what about these words 
in which Jesus is warning us as to how we re- 
ceive the appreciations of our friends, and as- 
suring us that if we receive those apprecia- 
tions, we actually cut ourselves off from some 
great blessing of God? 



INJURY FROM LOWER APPROVALS 11 



It is very simple. Notice that our Lord 
is not dealing with the giving of praise or 
honour; He is dealing with the receiving of it. 
He is simply putting us on guard against a 
wrong and sinful use to which we may put that 
praise and approval of friends, which used 
properly may be such a blessing to us, and such 
an assistance to our own best life. The danger 
which He discovers to us in this matter is one 
which we can see very clearly once our minds 
are directed to it. What is it! It is the danger 
of receiving honour one of another ; the danger 
of taking it in. The danger of making it the 
final standard of our private life, and later on 
of being satisfied with it. In fact, the danger 
here is the danger everywhere — it is the danger 
of stopping, the danger of cutting ourselves off 
from God. 

It is not only in the region of our moral 
life that it is disastrous to be satisfied with the 
approval of men: in every other region of 
spiritual life, the same peril besets men. 

We have a phrase which we apply to one 
who is quite obviously satisfied with the lower 
judgment, — we say " he plays to the gallery." 
We mean that he loves the praise of men more 
than the praise of God. We mean that he pre- 
fers to be paid for his work in the baser coin. 
He has no ambition for the lonely approval of 
his conscience as an artist. He has clipped his 



12 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



own wings. He has done with all real effort 
and aspiration. He has chosen this world, and 
by his choice has cut himself off from God. 

He is not without a reward. Nay, he has his 
reward. He is paid for his work. There is 
nothing standing to his credit in God's books, — 
as there is something standing to the credit of 
every humble and mortified spirit. 

Doubtless he has his lonely and unhappy 
hours when he comes home and sits down with 
himself, and when there crowd round about his 
spirit the greater things he might have done, 
the noble poverty he might still have had, and 
the holier compensations. Doubtless hours of 
that kind come to him, when he sees through 
himself, when he pronounces judgment upon 
himself, when he agrees that with all his get- 
ting, he has lost God and lost his own soul. 
And these words of Jesus come back to us, — 
* ' How can ye believe, which receive honour one 
from another, and seek not the honour which 
comes from God only! " 

"It's like those eerie stories nurses tell 
Of how some Actor on a stage played Death, 
With pasteboard crown, sham orb and tinselVd 
dart 

And called himself the monarch of the world, 
Then going to the tire-room afterward, 
Because the play was done, to shift himself, 



INJUEY FROM LOWER APPROVALS 13 



Got touched upon the sleeve familiarly 
The moment he had shut the closet door 
By death himself. Thus God might touch a 
Pope 

At unawares, ask what his baubles mean, 
And whose part he presumed to play just 
now. 

Best he yourself, imperial, plain and true." 

In our Lord's view, there is only one form of 
final failure and that is when one loses his 
sense of God, — of God personal to him, of 
God who is in all perfection, what we at our 
best are so poorly and fitfully. In our Lord's 
view, the saving attitude for a human soul is 
the attitude of perfect humility, and therefore 
of keen and living hope: the attitude towards 
perfect moral well-being, towards the perfect 
Christian soul, which the artist uttered when, 
standing before a masterpiece, a work infinitely 
beyond his power but not beyond the reach of 
his admiration, he exclaimed with great joy: 
" I also am an artist." 

That was our Lord's view; and in conse- 
quence in His view anything became a danger 
and a curse which threatened to create pride 
in a man, which threatened to seduce him from 
his sense of the absolutely good, which threat- 
ened to destroy his humility. It was for this 
reason, i.e., in the interests of a final humility 



14 AT CLOSE QUAETEES 



of the soul before God and life, that J esus said 
His severe things abont the love of money and 
the inordinate pursuit of it. His quarrel with 
riches was that they brought with them the 
risk of robbing a man of his simpleness and 
humility. There was the danger that his riches 
would flatter him ; that they would erect a lower 
standard of action within him; that he would 
take credit to himself for being rich and for- 
get that, face to face with the actual exigencies 
of life and death and heaven and hell, — he was 
all the time only what he was at heart. 

And so, our Lord, not to restrain the natural 
flow of kind words amongst us, but in order to 
put us on our guard against the abuse of kind 
words, uses these formidable words. He is 
warning us against turning the appreciation of 
friends into all the evil of a flattering tongue. 
He is warning us against being flattered with 
the praise of the world. For to permit ourselves 
to be flattered is, there and then, to come to a 
standstill morally. It is to lose the push and 
call of humility and aspiration. It is to blot 
out the future. It is to turn our back on all 
progress. It is to go out of training. It is to 
stop. It is to lose the qualification for any 
heaven. It is to be guilty of the sin of which 
the poet tells us that Verdi was guilty when, 
conducting a cheap and unworthy work of his 
own in Florence, he accepted, without shame, 



INJURY FROM LOWER APPROVALS 15 



the plaudits of the crowd. There he stood re- 
ceiving honour of men, his whole being aglow 
with the foolish and damning praise. There 
he stood, happy, excited, lost, — until, looking 
round, his eye fell upon Rossini, — his eye fell 
upon one who saw through the whole miserable 
business, his eye fell upon a master, — upon 
Rossini sitting patient in his stall. 

One is our Master, even Christ Jesus; be- 
fore Him we stand or fall. Let us see to it that 
no day pass without seeking His judgment, 
lest in this world we lose our finer sense and 
become corrupted with its unthinking ap- 
provals. 



II 



THE LOSS OF INFLUENCE 

"But he (Lot) seemed unto his sons-in-law as one that mocked." 
Gen. xix : 14, R. V. 

I WANT to speak for a few minutes on the 
loss of influence. I have taken for my text 
a verse of Holy Scripture which is a very ter- 
rible one when you think about it. When Lot 
spoke to his sons-in-law, appealing to them to 
come away from Sodom, he was at the moment 
altogether in earnest, and he was altogether 
right. And yet his previous relations with his 
sons-in-law had been of such a kind that his 
words had no influence at all: his words had 
no weight. Lot " seemed unto his sons-in-law 
as one that mocked,' 9 — as one who was only 
pretending. 

He had lived before their eyes. They had 
observed him. They had seen him off his 
guard. They had been admitted doubtless to 
many intimacies with him, and the consequence 
of it did not appear until this day of emergency 
when Lot wanted genuinely to help them, and 
when he found, and when they found, that there 
was not that relation between them which 

16 



THE LOSS OF INFLUENCE 17 



would convey or permit any moral influence or 
authority. When the day came in which he 
would have truly helped them, they looked 
across at him as though to say : 6 ' What part 
is this you are playing now! What do you 
want to be at? Who are you to adopt that 
tone ? It was you who brought us into Sodom ; 
you encouraged us to live in it; you yourself 
have always seemed to be very much at home 
in it. What has happened? " 

" He seemed unto his sons-in-law as one 
that mocked." That is a very grave verse. I 
shall not dwell long upon it. It would not be 
good to do so. It is not good for the soul to 
be wrung even with truth. There is a delicacy 
in the whole apparatus of the soul which makes 
it a hazardous thing to put too much pressure 
upon its sensibilities. There is a danger in 
touching crudely and directly the delicate 
mechanism; a danger in crossing the threshold 
of the inner sanctuary. There is a seeing of 
God which kills us — a seeing of the absolute 
truth of things which Christ came to spare us. 
There are some things, said the Apostle, which 
are not so much as to be mentioned. 

The loss of influence! Nothing is more 
tragic, nothing apparently more hopeless and 
irremediable. I do not see how, apart from 
the direct help and intervention of God, any of 
us can ever recover our influence and prestige 



18 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



once it has broken down. It can be done. It 
must be able to be done. If we believe in God, 
there must be resources to fill the chasm be- 
tween two human souls. And yet it is so diffi- 
cult, so rare, that we had better set out with 
the idea that in this matter God has put us each 
in charge of something of such a kind that if 
it slips from our hands, it falls upon a pave- 
ment and smashes into fragments and dust. 
You may gather the fragments and put them 
together more or less: but you cannot gather 
the dust. 

The first thing we may say about the loss of 
influence is that it is for the most part a grad- 
ual result. On the other hand, it is often a 
very sudden thing, or at least the discovery 
of it is very sudden. In relation to one an- 
other, we may be like the two ships in Clough's 
poem which set out side by side and all the 
night they dreamed they were cleaving the 
self-same waters, but at daybreak they were 
discovered by each other away on different 
horizons. 

" But blithe breeze; and great seas, 
Though ne'er that earliest parting past. 
On your wide plain they join again, 
Together lead them home at last. 

" One port, methought, alike they sought, 
One purpose hold where'er they fare, — 



THE LOSS OF INFLUENCE 19 



bounding breeze, rushing seas! 
At last, at last, unite them there! " 

A man is one day found out in some wicked- 
ness, and there and then the altars of trust 
are thrown down in the hearts of all who looked 
to him. But even in such a case, it is only 
the discovery which is sudden, and the public 
fact; the process which led up to it all within 
the man was secret and gradual. 

There is this very hard law in life, and we 
should all lay our account with it, that we may 
suffer in this very matter of influence, not for 
our sins only, but for our mistakes. One may 
suffer, for example, because of his manners, 
because of the way he speaks, it may be be- 
cause of an abruptness and thoroughness which 
does not make allowance for the slowness of 
other people 's minds. Many a career has been 
spoiled by the man's address. But unless we 
are all no better than petted children, this kind 
of loss of influence is not serious, and if on 
both sides there is even an approach to good 
will these separations of spirit will be filled in. 
And besides, God will not allow any of us to 
go on in life very long without laying upon us 
something which will take us more deeply into 
the heart of things and make us ashamed of 
these trifling misunderstandings. 

Still, life is so short, and these alienations 



20 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



are so pitiable, that we should apply Christian 
principles to our outward manners and to the 
little casual things we do towards one another. 
There ought to be no more poignant regret for 
any of us than the feeling that we have wounded 
the sensibilities and prejudices of another. 
But on the other hand we should be full of an 
equal regret and sense of blame if we have al- 
lowed ourselves to be wounded and aggrieved 
by things which, when one recalls the profound 
and tragic nature of our life, were of very 
small importance. I know of no more beauti- 
ful thing in the world than to see two people 
shaking hands after some such miserable 
alienation; and with a kind of catch in their 
voices which betrays the proximity of tears, 
each protesting that it was he and not the 
other who was the greater fool. That is one 
of the scenes on earth which give joy to the 
angels in heaven. Indeed, our Lord declared 
that we cannot come before God at all until 
we have removed any little thing of that kind 
from our soul. 

We may, therefore, pass away — having 
warned ourselves — from that loss of influence 
which is due to nothing worse than foolishness 
or error or misunderstanding. A mistake, 
after all, leaves a man inwardly clean and erect. 
It does not corrupt his nature or hinder him 
from lifting up his face to God without spot. 



THE LOSS OF INFLUENCE 21 



And one who in any misfortune has still the 
comfort of God can well wait till the clouds 
roll by. 

A totally different state of matters it is, 
when a man, in consequence of some lapse 
from personal or social rectitude, vacates his 
place in the thought and attitude toward him 
of other people. But here again let me delay, 
let me avoid the dark centre of this business, 
and approach it from an outer circle. 

There are many small misdemeanours, that 
come short of high-handed wickedness, which 
nevertheless play havoc with our moral in- 
fluence and prestige over others and their con- 
fidence in us. Let me instance one or two of 
these: they work at the roots of our influence 
as a worm works at the root of a flower, or at 
the heart of an apple — hiddenly and from the 
centre outwards. 

Any want of faithfulness to our spoken word 
is one of the ways by which we may stultify 
ourselves and reduce ourselves to impotence 
in relation to other people. And if we have 
given our word to a religious and Christian 
profession, to which we are not faithful in the 
actual habit and direction of our life, we have 
there reduced ourselves to the position of peo- 
ple who do not mean what they say and who 
are treated accordingly. 

It is not a very original thing to say, but 



22 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



it is a thing which will bear repetition, that it 
is just here that for the most part the moral 
authority of parents first begins to totter, or 
gradually to wear through. We say things and 
do not stand by them to the letter. We prom- 
ise things and we even forget what we prom- 
ised. And so our children come to think that 
we are ready to say anything to suit the 
exigency of the moment. In this way we train 
in our children that most pernicious of all 
habits of mind, namely, that words are not real 
things ; that they simply form what constitutes 
the higher subtilty of man over the animals, 
or over those who are weaker than himself; 
that speech is a mere trick, a mere accomplish- 
ment by which to escape some pressure of cir- 
cumstance. But the day comes when a parent 
does want to speak gravely and lovingly to his 
child, a father to his son, a mother to her 
grown-up daughter; and God have mercy upon 
us if when we speak we see in them something 
which means that we have forfeited the right 
to speak to them as we are presuming to speak; 
that we seem to them what Lot seemed to his 
sons-in-law, one who is acting a part, one who 
is merely pretending 

There is only one thing that any of us can do 
to any purpose if we know or suspect that we 
are losing or have lost the moral respect of 



THE LOSS OF INFLUENCE 23 



those with whom we should like to remain on 
sound and honourable terms. There is only- 
one way by which it may be we can get back 
the right of entry into their minds and hearts. 
Of course, it is quite impossible so long as we 
persist in the very courses which have de- 
stroyed our influence. The only thing we can 
do, the one thing we must do, is to enter into 
our private chamber, and shut the door, and 
lift up our heart to our Father Who sees in 
secret, Who knows everything and understands 
everything, and Who alone has the entrance 
into other minds as He has into ours. We 
cannot patch up a moral or spiritual reputa- 
tion. We must get and win an entirely new 
one. And we must begin at the beginning. 
Let no one regret too sorely that he has to 
begin again with God. It is better to begin 
now than to wish to begin some day when it 
is too late. It is better to try to win back our 
influence over our children and friends, if we 
have lost it, or injured it, so long as they are 
alive, and we have occasion to prove the reality 
of our concern and love for them; better that, 
than to wait until they are dead or gone and 
we can only beat our breast in anger and im- 
potence and shame. 

The path by which we recover lost influence, 
like every path that takes a man nearer to God 
and to the truth about himself, is sure to be 



24 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



a hard path — a true way of the Cross. But a 
good man does not want things to be made 
easy for him. He may have to apologize here 
and there. He may have to confess things 
which have lain hidden in his breast. Still, 
let him not hesitate. He is standing at the 
gate of new life. It may be an iron gate. Still, 
let him go right up to it, and I believe he will 
find that it will open of itself and admit him 
to the City of God. There may be many a 
pang of pain by the way: but it will be that 
kind of pain which we even like to feel — the 
pain of an old wound which away down at its 
base has begun to heal. It will be that kind of 
pain which means that the principle of sound 
life within us has been established. It will be 
the pain which itself is a proof that we are 
now on the way back to moral vigour, back to 
personal honour and to candid dealings with 
ourselves and with other people and with God. 

And it is on that way back, on that way up, 
on that way home, that Jesus Christ is with 
us with a depth and reality and blessedness 
which are in no other ways to be felt and known. 



Ill 



ENVY UNDER THE GUISE OF ZEAL 

"And the disciples of John and of the Pharisees used to fast: 
and they come and say unto Him, Why do the disciples of John 
and of the Pharisees fast, but Thy disciples fast not? 

"And Jesus said unto them, . . . The days will come, when 
the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall 
they fast in those days." S. Mark ii : 18-20; S. Matt, ix : 14-15; 
S. Luke v : 33-35. 

IT may be that those disciples of John and 
of the Pharisees were in trouble about this 
question of fasting or not fasting. The disciples 
of the Baptist had accepted a very severe rule of 
life. Their master had renounced society and had 
declared that the true life was possible for most 
people only by the way of abstinence and self- 
restraint and simplicity. They were the fol- 
lowers of one who had worn a leathern girdle, 
who had eaten only locusts and wild honey, who 
had fled from the entanglements of cities, who 
had gone into the wilderness for the peace and 
dignity of his soul ; one who in obedience to his 
private conscience had publicly denounced a 
King. Such was the Master whose disciples 
they claimed to be, and they knew that ' ' it is 
meet that the disciple should be as the master.' ' 

25 



26 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



The Pharisees who supported them in their 
question to Jesus were in a similar case. The 
true life for them, the righteous life was a 
life overshadowed and depressed by the awful 
demand of an inexorable law, worried and baf- 
fled also on every side by scruples and addi- 
tions. And then, having done everything, they 
knew that still they had fallen short. They 
could never hope for ease, for victory, for at- 
tainment in their religious life. At the best, 
religion was for them, on the one hand, a haunt- 
ing penetrating demand for correctness, depth 
after depth of scrupulous requirement; and on 
the other hand, a fatiguing effort to comply 
and an unrelieved vexation because they knew 
beforehand that they never could do better 
than fall short. 

Compared with the lot of the followers of 
Jesus, the followers of John and of the Phari- 
sees were like men toiling at oars, distressed 
by wind and tide, hands chafed, backs aching, 
and everywhere around them the terror of the 
deep, — when at the moment a ship glides past 
them, making for the same port but with the 
triumph of sails, and on board men whom those 
painful rowers know. 

It may very well be, therefore, that these 
men were seriously asking themselves and had 
decided to ask Jesus, why it was, that for them 
religion was a demand, whereas for His dis- 



ENVY UNDER THE GUISE OF ZEAL 27 



ciples religion seemed a Power; why, in their 
case, religion brought anxiety, scrupulousness 
as of men walking on the edge of an abyss, 
whereas in the case of His disciples, religion 
seemed to have brought surefootedness, liberty, 
joy, and a certain shining of the countenance. 
It may be that these men were raising the ques- 
tion which S. Paul raised and Luther raised, — 
the ancient question between faith and works, 
between legalism, ceremonial, feasts, fasts, and 
the complicated machinery of tradition, — be- 
tween all that and the unmistakable fact that 
a man may be lifted clear out of his failure 
and impotence by the grace of Jesus Christ 
and may from that moment live his life with 
Christ in God. Perhaps they were feeling the 
contrast between a religion which is to be per- 
formed with oars and a religion in which a 
man may hoist a sail and have joy in his course. 

That then is one interpretation of their ques- 
tion: they were serious men asking for guid- 
ance on a matter about which they were at a 
loss. 

But another interpretation is possible; and, 
in all the circumstances, it is perhaps the 
more likely. It is that these men were simply 
envious. Because the disciples of Jesus were 
to all appearances happier than themselves, the 
disciples of John and of the Pharisees insin- 
uated that therefore they could not be so good. 



28 AT CLOSE QUABTERS 



" Why do we fast, and you do not fast? n 
Why is there a certain pressure and strain upon 
our souls, while others are at ease? Why 
must we toil at the oars, while others hoist a 
sail? Why are we aware of troubles, shadows, 
cares, of which some people whom we know 
seem to be entirely free? These are questions 
which we sometimes put to ourselves, and per- 
haps, when we put them to ourselves, there is 
always a certain hardness and bitterness in our 
minds at the moment — the hardness and injus- 
tice which envy brings. We may deceive our- 
selves as to the real feeling in our minds. We 
may suppose that we are only concerned for 
people who have not our seriousness, or who 
have not our experience of difficulties. What 
is envy on our part may appear to ourselves to 
be something very different. It may seem to 
us to be our zeal, and that in it we are doing 
honour to God and to the soul in man. And 
yet all the time it may be only envy, — a spirit 
which hinders any good influence we might be 
exerting upon others, and meanwhile destroys 
our own peace. 

Let me name some instances in which the 
sin of envy may very easily assume the cloak 
of zeal. And there is need that we consider 
ourselves rather carefully in this. It is a sin 
to which perhaps only religious, earnest-minded 
people are liable. Envy itself threatens us all 



ENVY UNDER THE GUISE OF ZEAL 29 



in various ways; but envy which adopts the 
tone of seriousness, envy which makes us speak 
as though we were not seeking anything for 
ourselves, but for God, is a rarer and more 
exquisite sin. It threatens only religious and 
serious people, as for example here, the dis- 
ciples of John and of the Pharisees who, we 
must not forget, were the most serious people 
in the world at that moment. 

(a) We may fall into the sin of envy under 
the cloak of zeal in our attitude towards those 
who are younger than ourselves. They are 
younger in years or younger in experience than 
we are. Their hearts in consequence are 
brighter than ours, gayer, in fact younger. 
They find occasions for happiness where we 
find none ; or we know that the happiness which 
they are making so much of will soon become 
flat and stale. And so we accuse them to our- 
selves of being light-minded, enthusiastic, friv- 
olous, wanting in depth and soberness, when 
the fact is, they are only young. So far as 
there is the taint of hardness or bitterness in 
our thought about them, it is mere envy of 
them, envy that they have still something, the 
first and natural harmony of the soul which in 
our own case life has assailed and broken. 
The proof that there is something sinful in our 
feeling is that it has made us unfair. It has 
made us forget the careless joys of our own 



30 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



earlier days. We forget, too, the more serious 
and abiding joys which are ours now, since we 
are older, which in the nature of the case they 
cannot yet have because they are young. We 
forget what experience has taught us, — the need 
of faith as a faculty for life, and faith itself 
which has come to us as a pearl of great 
price, for it came to us under God in conse- 
quence of some wound which was dealt to us 
in the battle of life. We forget all these things. 
We forget that "joy cometh in the morning.' 9 
We forget that the gaiety and enthusiasm of 
youth is the wonderful gift of God and serves 
as a flying start in the long race of life. And 
in regard to ourselves, we forget, or we do not 
at the moment esteem at their proper worth, 
the abiding blessings which life has brought 
us — the wiser and more informed mind, the 
deeper understanding, the more disciplined 
will, and that by the mercy of God we have 
weathered somehow the perilous promontories 
of youth. 

Surely, instead of envying the young and in- 
experienced their natural and proper joy and 
dealing with it forbiddingly, it should be our 
part, — and our very faith in God urges us, — to 
give thanks to Him for the never-failing stream 
of fresh life which He pours into our world, 
and to pray for all young lives known to us 
that they may be enabled to bear the delicate 



ENVY UNDER THE GUISE OF ZEAL 31 



chalice of their innocence on into their maturer 
days, — to carry forward the hope, the natural 
faith, the very illusions of youth, so that they 
may remain as a blessed ferment in any later 
wisdom which they may ever achieve. 

(b) It is this same sin, similarly disguised, — 
envy under the cloak of zeal, — that we have 
fallen into, when we complain that we have 
troubles from which others seem to be spared: 
" Wherefore do we fast and thy disciples fast 
not? " 

We are tempted, for example, to say severe 
things against those who are rich in this world's 
goods. And those severe things may all be true. 
(Riches are often spoken of in the Bible, but 
they are never well spoken of.) What I am 
urging is that we must take care in what tone, 
with what secret motive, we say our severe 
things. We must see to it that our own in- 
dignation and threatening has not a note of bit- 
terness. We must see that when we seem to 
be speaking for God, we are not merely indulg- 
ing ourselves, that we are not taking a kind of 
revenge against a certain class of people. For 
there is a worldly-mindedness which comes not 
with the possession of riches but with the ab- 
sence of riches. 

You know the class of feelings with which I 
am dealing. In the Providence of God our life 
may have been a very hard one, as we think. 



32 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



We see people round about us who seem to have 
no cares; certainly they have not our cares, 
and the danger is that we blame them, blame 
them because they have not been called upon to 
undergo our particular discipline. We find our- 
selves almost wishing that they might be called 
upon to suffer what we are suffering, to taste 
life as we know it. We may even imagine that 
this is a religious feeling, that we have this 
wish for them because we think it would do 
them good. Whereas, once more there may be 
nothing in our heart but envy, nothing but re- 
belliousness against the lot which God has given 
ourselves. 

" Why do we fast and they fast not! " we 
cry : but it is not because we think that fasting 
would be good for them — at the moment we evi- 
dently think it good for nobody ; but because we 
are envying them their ease. We say our 
severe things not because our love of God is 
strong but because for the time being we have 
lost our love of God. We condemn them sim- 
ply because we have not their good fortune: 
and no good can ever come of it. Satan can- 
not cast out Satan. 

(c) Often it is this same sin and under the 
same disguise — envy under the cloak of zeal — 
when we suspect the religious life of others be- 
cause it does not take the same direction, the 
same kind of expression as our own. It may 



ENVY UNDER THE GUISE OF ZEAL 33 



be that our religious life is habitually burden- 
some and morose. This may be due to our 
temperament or it may be one consequence of 
our earlier life having been self-indulgent and 
disorderly. Or it may be that we inherit a kind 
of shadow in our blood which makes our battle 
a peculiarly lonely one. But whatever be the 
reason, our religious life, the life which Christ 
seems to involve us in, is above all things se- 
vere, intense, full of cries out of the depths and 
answers from God that intoxicate. The sky, 
God's Face, for us holds many formidable 
clouds. When it is bright with us, it is very 
bright, and when it is dark, we are ready to 
die. "We fast oft." 

That being our condition we look abroad upon 
the world of men. We see those who claim to 
share our faith. They trust the Same Love, 
they look for Salvation to the Same Cross. But 
how much happier they are than we. They 
seem to have entered the Christian life more 
easily than we found it possible, and to con- 
tinue in it with less violence of feeling. 

And the danger is that we begin to suspect 
that their devotion to Christ cannot be as real 
as ours. We find ourselves almost expecting 
them to break down, to fall away, because we 
think they have not entered by the strait gate 
or built their spiritual life upon the Eock. 

Once more, we forget everything which would 



34 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



make us charitable; we forget charity itself. 
We forget that as human souls are different 
every one from every other, so the Spirit of 
God works out variously in them. We forget 
too that God may deal with us severally as He 
wills. It may please Him, for it may be for our 
welfare, that our journey should never be easy, 
that for us as for " Christian " in the " Pil- 
grim's Progress," our renewed life may present 
us with a Slough of Despond, a Doubting Castle, 
a Giant Despair, and even when we reach the 
River of Death, we may find it swollen and 
perilous. While for another He may have de- 
creed a different and more prosperous journey. 
For another He may have ordained as for 
" Hopeful " in that same great allegory, that 
there should be no Slough of Despond, and for 
another as for " Faithful " that when he came 
to the River of Death he should find the water 
at its shallowest and the footing safe and easy. 

But why should a much buffeted servant of 
the Lord speak enviously or suspiciously be- 
cause God has chosen a more pleasant way for 
others? If God has given them peace and a 
joyful journey, why should another complain? 
When we become envious, we forget these 
things. We forget that as in the story of the 
miracle, there were those who came early and 
were sitting at the feet of Jesus, while others, 
coming late, could not get at Him with their 



ENVY UNDER THE GUISE OF ZEAL 35 



burden, but had to climb the roof and tear it 
up and let themselves down in front of Him ; — 
so there are many, God grant there be more and 
more, who, children of many prayers, born into 
prayerful homes, their eyes beholding only 
comely things, may grow up in holiness as by 
a gentle supernatural pressure upon nature it- 
self, their innocence surviving and confirmed in 
faith, coming easily to their Saviour because 
truly they have never been far from Him; — 
though to the end of the days there will be 
those who at the last come back to Christ late 
and with difficulty, — God's prodigal children 
who will not arise until the loneliness of their 
condition is such that they can endure it no 
more. Then something hard breaks within 
them, and on a flood of tears their soul sets out 
for God. 

Let us rejoice and be glad that God has all 
kinds of ways for bringing us to Himself. Let 
us recall that the Heavenly City has twelve 
Gates, each one a Pearl, and there are pearls 
like the opal which are full of shadows, and 
other pearls which are full of sweet and tender 
light. And in any case, " Love envieth not," 
" Love thinketh no evil." 



IV 



HOW CAN SATAN CAST OUT SATAN? 

"How can Satan cast out Satan?" S. Mark iii : 23. 

OUE Lord used these words to repel an 
evil report which His enemies were try- 
ing to put into circulation. The report was that 
the great work that He was performing, the 
diseases He was healing, the evil spirits He 
was casting out, — all this He was doing by the 
help of that mysterious power for mischief 
which lay behind everything. He was the agent 
or instrument of the power of darkness; and 
therefore, people must not be deceived by the 
fact that He was doing wonderful things. They 
must rather avoid and oppose One Who was so 
manifestly in the hands of some mysterious and 
diabolical power. Such was the charge which 
was brought against Jesus at the very begin- 
ning of His Messianic life. We may wonder 
that Jesus had enemies at all. We may won- 
der that men should actually hate Jesus and 
lie awake at night planning how they could do 
Him some new injury. Yet, as we go on living 
we wonder less and less, until we cease to won- 

36 



CAN SATAN CAST OUT SATAN? 37 



der at all. It is a thing not to be wondered 
at but to be deplored and considered and feared, 
for it helps to discover to us the moral nature 
of this world of ours, — that when Jesus, the 
purest Soul that ever breathed our air, ap- 
peared in this world, there should be a new 
activity, a new anger and resourcefulness away- 
down in the evil heart of things. If this uni- 
verse, as we believe, is, in the last analysis, 
spiritual, the garment and expression of moral 
reason and intelligence or will, then we must 
be prepared for a continual warfare between 
higher and lower principles, and to believe that 
when, as in the public ministry of our blessed 
Lord, the good principle of things was made 
manifest, that just then the evil principle of 
things should be aroused and intensified. 

There is something in the hearts of men which 
hates the good until, by some operation of 
heaven, those hearts are changed. For the 
good is felt to be an accusation. It affects the 
evil in men's hearts as a sudden light let in 
upon creeping things affects them: it disturbs 
them, it threatens them, it makes uncomfort- 
able and impossible a state of matters to which 
they had grown accustomed. The good man is 
felt to be a rebel against the mere natural order, 
and it will always be the instinct of the ma- 
jority to put him down. 



38 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



Our Lord's enemies, I was saying, tried to 
poison the wells against Him by circulating as 
the explanation of the power of Jesus which 
they could not deny or gainsay, that it was an 
evil power of which He was the instrument or 
agent, — that dreadful spirit of evil which con- 
tends with God for the control of this world. 
Our Lord, we read, when He heard this charge, 
gathered His disciples about Him. They were 
just at the beginning of their obedience. They 
were at that stage — the stage of young boys and 
girls in our civilisation — when any cynical word 
spoken by older people may have the effect of 
corrupting them, and of making a religious life 
almost impossible for ever. Later on, cynical 
words and low ways of looking at life and things, 
may not have such a disastrous power, but 
there is a stage when cynical words, and low 
ways of looking at life, falling upon a fresh and 
open mind, may set up a kind of blood-poison- 
ing from which it may well be that souls never 
quite recover in this world. The disciples were 
at that stage ; and so our Lord took them aside 
and spoke to them about this wicked sugges- 
tion, — that the good works He was doing He 
did by the help of an evil power. He spoke to 
them very simply, almost playfully. He was 
not even angry, at least at first, though a mo- 
ment afterwards, thinking about it all, He was 
led to utter His one tremendous and awful say- 



CAN SATAN CAST OUT SATAN? 39 



ing about the unpardonable sin. But at the out- 
set of His answer He was light and playful. In 
effect He said : 6 1 What these men allege is 
quite obviously absurd. They say that I cast 
out evil by the help of evil. How can that be? 
Is it even sensible or according to reason? 
How would it promote the interests of the evil 
one to become his own enemy and to oppose 
evil? 97 It was, as we should say, a contradic- 
tion in terms: for " how can Satan cast out 
Satan? » 

These words are of that precious kind which 
have bearings and meanings and applications 
beyond their first intention. They are words 
which we may well believe would occur to the 
disciples in later days, when they were called 
on to continue, in persecuted and lonely lives, 
something of the very passion of their Lord. 
They are among the very deepest words I know. 
I can think of none more searching, and from 
which it is harder to escape. They lay a mighty 
task upon every human soul: and if they do 
predict, as they do indeed, a great day of the 
Lord when God will be All in All, it is a day 
which lies on the other side of a world-wide 
self -crucifixion. They are words which we 
should hang as a motto where they will meet 
us and challenge us in the morning, at noon, and 
towards the close of each day. " How can 
Satan cast out Satan? " They are words to 



40 AT CLOSE QUAETEES 



Bay over to ourselves when we are on the edge 
of giving way to justifiable anger and to re- 
member and clutch at when we are tempted to 
take some revenge. They are words for every 
one who loves his fellows and would fain see 
them happier, since they appeal to us not to 
give way to impatience. For impatience like- 
wise is sin, and how is the world made better 
by our becoming worse? ' ' How can Satan cast 
out Satan! 99 When we remember, what is the 
fact, that almost all our happiness depends upon 
our relation and intercourse with other people, 
especially with the people who come closely and 
regularly about us, we see what a word of guid- 
ance this may be. Why, our own very soul is 
made up of the accumulated attitudes, prefer- 
ences, antipathies, loves, fears, hatreds, forgive- 
nesses which we take up and exercise towards 
our fellows. Even such a mystical and unworldly 
writer as S. John is bold enough to say that 
if our relations with the people round about us 
are not right, then our relation with God Him- 
self can never be right. In view of all that, 
take deeply into your thoughts and practice the 
message of these words, " How can Satan cast 
out Satan? " And in closing let me say exactly 
what I mean, by giving a case. 

There is some one, let us suppose, with whom 
you are in unhappy relations. You may define 
them further as you will. It may be a coldness 



CAN SATAN CAST OUT SATAN? 41 



that has sprung up between yon, or a pro- 
nounced unfriendliness, or, on his side, a posi- 
tive hatred. May God have mercy upon us 
that such things are possible ! "Well, I am sup- 
posing that you are a Christian man or woman, 
who find yourself so situated, one who wants 
to do what is best, even though it is hard, as 
it is sure to be hard. Well, Satan cannot cast 
out Satan: remember that. You will need to 
pray now as you never prayed before : indeed, 
you are at one of the places in life where you 
begin to see the use and terrible need of re- 
ligion. Without religion, left to yourself, or 
even to the ways of people round about you, you 
would become aggressive towards this person 
who is hostile to you. You would accuse him 
of some meanness or treachery to his face. 
Well, even that may be your duty, though I 
doubt it, and even if it be your duty, you will 
take care that you yourself have a quiet and re- 
ligious heart before you stand before him. You 
must not allow yourself to become a worse per- 
son in trying to make him better. You may be 
able to punish him, to trouble him, to bring back 
something upon his own head, but you will 
hesitate if you recall this mild and searching 
word of Jesus, " How can Satan cast out 
Satan? " 

We must all of us who are in any position 
of the kind, pray God to give us grace to take 



42 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



quite the other way. We must pray God to 
give us grace to crucify ourselves in any matter 
of private resentment or mortified feeling. We 
must try to see that God by this very experience 
is asking us to rise above ourselves, to get over 
ourselves, to take that step over our own heart 
— with all its swift and hot impulses — which 
leaves us exhausted, indeed, but leaves us on 
the breast of Christ Whose whole life was the 
daily doing of that same thing. 

No: Satan cannot cast out Satan. Evil can- 
not effect good. A bad spirit, however subtle 
its methods of acting may be, can never ulti- 
mately bring about any sound or happy rela- 
tionship. Only the good can unseat the evil. 
That, at least, is our Christian faith; for that 
was our Lord's own habit. We are not to seek 
a private vengeance. When we could destroy 
our enemy, we are asked to spare him, and to 
spare him handsomely. 

There is a painting by Burne-Jones which is 
full of the agony and blessedness of this holy 
pardoning spirit. Beneath the picture the ar- 
tist has written, " How a good knight spared 
his enemy who had done him wrong, when he 
might have slain him, and how the figure of 
Christ bent down from the crucifix and kissed 
the good knight to show that his deed was ap- 
proved by God." And that is what we see in 



CAN SATAN CAST OUT SATAN? 43 



the picture. A knight observes coming towards 
him his enemy whom he knows he has it in 
his power to slay, whose death he likewise 
knows would, by all the laws of man, be held 
as just. But at the same moment he sees, 
erected by the wayside, the Cross with the 
figure of Jesus stretched upon it. Involun- 
tarily, i.e., in obedience to something deeper 
than his private resentment, he kneels at the 
feet of Jesus, and stays there, with head bent 
upon His bleeding feet until his enemy has 
passed. And as he kneels, the figure of Jesus 
bends in love over him, and kisses his bowed 
head in token that his sacrifice has been ac- 
cepted and his deed, his crucifixion of himself, 
approved by God. 

No, Satan cannot cast out Satan: only that 
other kind can cast him out. " For what 
glory is it, if, when ye sin and are buffeted 
for it, ye shall take it patiently? But if, when 
ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, 
this is acceptable with God. For hereunto were 
ye called; because Christ also suffered for 
you, leaving you an example, that ye should fol- 
low His steps : who did not sin, neither was guile 
found in His mouth : who, when He was reviled, 
reviled not again ; when He suffered, threatened 
not ; but committed Himself to Him that judgeth 
righteously : who His own self bare our sins in 



44 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



His body upon the tree, that we, having died unto 
sins, might live unto righteousness: by Whose 
stripes ye were healed.' ' 

To Whom be all praise in the Church for 
ever and ever. Amen. 



V 



THE KNOWLEDGE OF CHRIST AS RISEN 

"Him God raised up the third day, and shewed Him openly; not 
to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to 
us, who did eat and drink with Him after He rose from the dead." 
Acts x : 40, 41. 

THE life and death of Jesus were in public : 
the Eesurrection and Ascension were in 
private. So long as He was going about doing 
good, living out the life which had been ap- 
pointed Him, He was to be seen by all men. 
There were, of course, occasions, hours here 
and there, when Jesus withdrew from the pub- 
lic gaze, times when He wished to be alone with 
those few who believed in Him. And there were 
times when He wished to be quite alone, i.e., with 
God. But these were short intervals of seclu- 
sion, such as are inevitable in the case of every- 
one, in a life which, on the whole, was passed 
openly before the eyes of men. Jesus walked 
by the common highways. He was to be found 
in the synagogue. He was present at one wed- 
ding party: He may have been present at 
many. He took supper in the house of a well- 
known Jew. In short Jesus showed Himself 

45 



46 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



openly to the world, mingling freely with men, 
frequenting busy places where people congre- 
gate, as if He was willing to be seen and known 
and spoken to. The consequence was that the 
name of Jesus was quite familiar to the people. 
They knew His figure on the streets. When 
they heard Him speak, one would say to an- 
other, 6 i Is not this the carpenter's son? 99 
Thus He lived openly in the eyes of all the 
world. Men could see Him and listen to Him 
and speak to Him without effort. And as His 
life was lived openly, so His death was a public 
spectacle. He was crucified on the top of a hill 
just outside the city wall, in a place where all 
men might see Him, where the passers-by might 
see Him almost without looking. He was cruci- 
fied at a time, too, when strangers from all 
parts were gathered into Jerusalem. As many 
of these as cared could see Him in that agony 
of death which, for Jesus, had no quiet room, 
no silence, no decency. In after years when 
His name and Resurrection were proclaimed in 
the far-off lands from which they had come, 
those strangers would remember that they had 
seen Him die. Thus He died as He had lived, 
openly, before the eyes of men. Careless peo- 
ple, scoffers, the malicious ones who thought 
they had gained their point, saw Jesus on 
Calvary. Aye : but they never saw Him again ! 
We turn now to what we are told of Jesus 



THE CHEIST AS EISEN 47 



in the days that followed His burial. How 
changed is everything! Jesus, Who formerly 
was to be seen by all men, now reveals Himself 
to one here and there, and always to His friends 
only. The world, as such, has never seen the 
risen Lord. He appears no more to men in the 
mass, but to solitary individuals who, at the 
time, are recalling the days they had spent with 
Him and who are sad because those days are 
past. He appears no more in public now, but 
always in private and only to those who are 
eager and prepared to see Him. The careless 
ones see Him no more. He appears now to 
Mary who had gone all alone to His grave to 
anoint His body with spices. He appears to 
Peter who, in the scenes and occupations of his 
early days, was trying to forget his love and 
his shame. He appears to the little company 
who had been with Him through dark and try- 
ing times. He appears to them once when 
Thomas is not with them, and again when 
Thomas is with them — this time for the sake 
of Thomas. He appears to those twelve men 
whom a common love and a common loss had 
brought together. He appears to them when 
the doors are shut, when no one is speaking, 
when they are sitting together, probably in the 
very room where, on the night of the betrayal, 
He had broken bread amongst them. He ap- 
pears to them when they are sitting together, 



48 AT CLOSE QUAETEES 



glad to be near to one another in that silence 
and support of friends which we ourselves still 
crave when our grief is at its deepest. It was 
in such an hour and to human hearts reduced 
to such a state of tenderness that He ap- 
peared — He of Whom they were all thinking at 
the moment. It was the voice of One dear to 
them that broke the silence and breathed over 
them the words, " Peace be unto you." And 
looking up they saw Him there, and the bitter- 
ness was past for ever. 

It is this that I wish to think over along with 
you: how, while there are things about Jesus 
which are plain to all men, to the careless, aye, 
even to His enemies, there are numberless other 
things which are made known or are verified 
only to those who look to Jesus, not with a 
casual eye, but out of the deep and even tragic 
places of their life : only to those who feel their 
burden, their secret, drawing them towards 
Christ with a kind of inevitableness, by a cer- 
tain pressure of faith and sorrow. As we have 
said, the life and death of Jesus were in public : 
the Eesurrection and Ascension were in private. 
All men knew that Jesus had lived and had 
died — the world still knows as much as that. 
But it was only to selected spirits that He 
showed Himself risen from the dead, and alive 
for evermore. Men had need only of their 
eyes and their ears to see Him live, and to hear 



THE CHEIST AS RISEN 49 



the words He spoke ; but they needed a certain 
training, a certain eagerness of the soul, a cer- 
tain previous experience, before they could see 
and feel the presence of the risen Lord. As the 
Scripture puts it, " Him God raised up the 
third day, and shewed Him openly; not to 
all the people, but unto witnesses chosen be- 
fore of God, even to us, who did eat and drink 
with Him after He rose from the dead." 

Now, this is a truth, a way of looking at the 
entire matter of faith, which, perhaps, needs 
to be seriously and particularly brought be- 
fore men in our own day. There are many who 
speak as though to have doubts about the risen 
and exalted life of Christ, were an evidence of 
some mental superiority over the common be- 
liever. But what if their doubt and ignorance 
of the Spiritual Person of Christ be due rather 
to the failure in them of some real and normal 
human faculty ! What if it be due to a morbid 
deference to the purely intellectual aspect of 
things ! What if it be due to a morbid suspicion 
of the more generous and enthusiastic elements 
of their own nature! What if it be due to a 
certain subtle form of pride or wilfulness which 
leads them to suppose that it is unworthy of 
them ever to act or believe on an impulse, how- 
ever generous or holy; that it is becoming to 
them only to go so far as the external evidence 
warrants, to act, as they would say, according 



50 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



to reason: forgetting that not thus has man 
ever done anything either great or good, for- 
getting that we live by faith not by sight, and 
that every loyalty of the soul, human love, the 
love of country, the zeal of martyrs, the pa- 
tience of the poor, and the very consent to go 
on living — forgetting that every one of these 
would wither and die under the cold challenge 
of our merely intellectual parts, and that they 
survive because we are not rationalists but 
men, having hearts as well as heads, who can 
see a flag in the region of the spirit and can 
follow it even unto death. There is no reason 
why we should be brave or true or patient, why 
we should do anything or believe anything be- 
yond our animal propensities. There is no 
reason: but there is a call. And it is the very 
essence of man, the thing that crowns him, that 
he is not afraid to be loyal to suggestions, 
dreams, imaginations, faiths, which find their 
proof, not in argument, but in that satisfaction 
and peace of the soul, in that sense of power 
and greatness which comes to us when we let 
go our misgivings and yield ourselves fully to 
the highest summons of the Spirit, which, for 
you and me, is the faith of our fathers. 

There are many in our own day who con- 
fess that they regard the human life of Jesus 
as the most beautiful and morally perfect life 
which has ever breathed our air. Even that is 



THE CHBIST AS EISEN 51 



a true faith in Christ if those who profess it 
will permit that holy life to dominate their 
own. 

But obviously such was not the faith in 
Christ on which the Church of Christ was built. 
Obviously there is a higher, a more subtle, a 
more spiritual apprehension of Christ than 
that. Obviously there is more in Christ than 
all that, for others have found more. For we 
must not forget that the Scriptures which tell 
us of the human life of Jesus, are the same 
Scriptures which tell us also of His super- 
natural revival and continuance after death. 
We have no higher authority for believing that 
Jesus ever lived at all than we have for believ- 
ing that He rose from the dead and appeared 
amongst men. 

The fact is there is an acquaintance with 
Jesus which is something very different from 
the knowledge of Christ as Lord. And until we 
know Christ as Lord, we must understand that 
we do not know Him, and that we do not ap- 
preciate Him, as He has been known and ap- 
preciated by men and women like ourselves. 

Now I am quite prepared to admit that our 
appreciation of Christ, and, indeed, of the whole 
body of religious truth, is bound to vary 
amongst men, according to their temperament, 
according to their knowledge, according to all 
sorts of differences, inherited and acquired. 



52 AT CLOSE QUAKTEES 



And there is a broad distinction between peo- 
ple, as there is between races of people, in the 
degree of warmth and imagination and con- 
creteness which they put into their religious 
ideas. On these matters we must take care not 
to judge one another. It may be easy for one 
man to say more and to go further in the way 
of religious expression than another man: yet, 
it may be that his rich and warm confession 
does not mean so much to him, does not affect 
him so deeply, as the more reserved and diffi- 
cult confession of the other. There is in the 
ordinary affairs of the world the kind of man 
who says much and really means probably a 
little less than he says, and there is the kind 
of man who says little, and really means more 
than he says. 

This is certainly true of us in our confes- 
sions of personal faith. There are those of 
us for whom faith is an enthusiasm, and we 
condemn ourselves, if, for a day, we find our 
hearts cold. But there are others — and God 
knows us all and knows us one by one — for 
whom religion is above everything else a thing 
of the will, the daily submission of one's rest- 
less and wayward nature to the reasonable de- 
mand of God. It may be, therefore, that there 
is a warm and adoring enjoyment of Christ's 
presence which is not so easy for those of a 
certain disposition. But that is not to say that 



THE CHRIST AS RISEN 53 



these last should rest satisfied with any appre- 
hension of Christ less joyful, less immediate, 
and controlling than has been reached by the 
saints of all ages. 

On this whole matter, we have guidance. Let 
us remember that it was to His friends that 
Christ appeared: it was for the most part to 
those who had spent days and years with Him. 
This, then, would seem to be our part, — to get 
near to Christ, to know Him, as He lived and 
spoke, as He bore our burden and tasted death 
for us. We are to let our heart go out to Him, 
in those hours which come to us all when our 
heart would fain go out to the great Author of 
our being if we could be sure of finding Him : 
to Some One, if only we could find Him, Who 
would understand us altogether. 

We say that a man ought to have the courage 
of his opinions. That may be, but something 
more is asked of us and is necessary for the 
life of faith. We must have the courage of 
our feelings. We must not smother the cry of 
our weakness, of our solitude, of our hopes and 
fears, in fact, of our humanity. We must be 
brave — brave to yield to our own deepest life, 
brave to go down upon our knees in secret. 
We must be brave and when our heart and 
flesh cry out for God, to let it cry, until, like 
a child in the dark, it finds in Christ the breast 
of God. And, if we find God in Christ, again 



54 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



we are to be brave — brave to believe in our- 
selves, in the truth of this secret guidance, and 
in the authority of this experience. 

This is what we have to do if we would rise 
into the knowledge and fellowship of the risen 
Lord. By an act of prayer and personal in- 
tegrity, let us invoke His Presence to be with 
us in the morning as we set out upon each day. 
And through the day by many a momentary 
lifting up of our heart let His Holy Will fall 
across our purposes and ambitions, until we 
learn to feel the difference between His ap- 
proval and His rebuke. In our deep experi- 
ences, let us believe that He is there to help us, 
there to understand us. If an hour should ever 
come to us when we do not see our way, " on 
this perplexing path of life," let us seek His 
face Who, in a life of greater sorrows than 
ours, never for one instant hesitated. If a day 
should ever come to us when, by reason of some 
great loss, or bereavement, or shame, we falter, 
and, for a time, our soul is shaken to its founda- 
tions, still let us grow calm in fellowship with 
His great calmness. Thus let us live " as see- 
ing Him who is invisible,' ' and life itself, life 
with all its ups and downs, life itself will do 
the rest. Let us thus live, as seeing Him, 
and soon we shall see Him as they who loved 
Him saw Him while the world saw Him not. 
Soon we too, even the most sober and reserved 



THE CHRIST AS RISEN 55 



of us, shall have good reason to think of Him 
as no more in Galilee or in Jerusalem ; no more 
as dead and buried in the distant past; least 
of all shall we think of Him as still ' ' lying in 
a lone Syrian grave beneath the Syrian stars.' ' 
But speaking to Him as a man speaketh to his 
friend, life, experience, and the necessities of 
our position in this world, will do the rest, and 
we shall more and more see Him as the saints 
have seen Him, alive and risen, and seated at 
the right hand of God. 



VI 



THE PEACE OF GOD, — THE ESCAPE 
FROM AXXIETY 

"In nothing be anxious; but in everything by prayer and sup- 
plication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known 
unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understand- 
ing, shall guard your hearts and thoughts in Christ Jesus." Phi- 
lippians iv ; 6,7. 

THESE are strange words for a man to 
write who, to reason merely from his cir- 
cumstances, ought himself to have been over- 
whelmed with anxieties. " Do not be anxious- 
minded," he writes. " Be careful for noth- 
ing.' ' It is strange to us that he could write 
at all, strange that he could detach himself 
from his own cares and fears, that he could 
think away from himself so as to take upon 
his heart the cares and troubles of others. And 
still more wonderful to our natural expectation 
is it that when he did bring himself to think of 
others, he should be able to hide entirely his 
own condition at the time. You would never 
know that the man who is speaking is himself 
at that moment in sore straits. You feel indeed 
that he is a man who has at some time in his 
life been in trouble; he knows so well the lan- 

56 



THE PEACE OF GOD 57 



guage of the troubled heart, and knows the deep 
cure for care. We should say, — even if we 
know nothing more of Paul, — that he had been 
in distress; but we should suppose that his 
troubles were long since past and that at this 
moment he is enjoying the fruits of his suf- 
fering, and speaking out of the fulness of his 
memory. 

For there is no distress in his words, nothing 
to indicate that his own future at the time was 
full of danger. There is, on the contrary, a most 
wonderful sense of peace, and of superiority 
over the world. 

Now, we could understand why the Apos- 
tle, though he had troubles of his own, set 
himself to write to the Philippians, and how 
it was that he forgot his own troubles as he 
thought of them; we could understand these 
things, I say, if we could believe that the Phi- 
lippians were enduring some burden heavier 
than his own. For we ourselves know how, un- 
less we are selfish to an alarming degree, we lose 
our own troubles when we stand before another 
who, as we see, has still more to bear than we. 
We must all of us know the kind of experience 
I am meaning, — when we are ashamed that we 
ever complain as we become aware of the sorer 
burdens which many of our brethren and 
neighbours bear. How our secret complaints 
and grudges die away within us when we come 



58 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



face to face with others who have things to en- 
dure alongside which we hate to think of what 
we allowed to trouble us. 

But that was not the situation when the 
Apostle wrote. His was the harder lot. Com- 
pared with his condition, the Philippians were 
at ease. There was indeed a dispute amongst 
the members but that only proves that they 
were not in any real trouble, that their hearts 
were not heavy with sorrow. 

It was, therefore, the one who was suffering , 
most who felt most surely the peace of God. 
When they were all of them in trouble, it was 
he who had the heaviest burden who alone was 
quiet enough to offer help and sympathy to the 
others. 

This we say is strange and it is to be ex- 
plained only by a spiritual law. We should 
expect that those who suffer least in this world 
would be the most hopeful, would be the most 
firmly persuaded of the goodness of God and 
of the high promise in things. And yet it is 
not so. It is nearer the truth to say that those 
who suffer most in this world are most per- 
suaded of life's profound and holy meaning 
and of the real superintendence of God. And 
certain it is that those who suffer in some deep 
and utter way have usually a surer faith and a 
sweeter spirit than others whom suffering has 
touched lightly, ruffing the skin and surface 



THE PEACE OF GOD 59 



of their life, not reaching to their very heart 
making it bleed. Thus it comes to pass, that 
one who is enduring some great sorrow, so 
heavy and intimate that it can only be borne 
by the help of God through ceaseless prayer, is 
able to minister comfort to another who is only 
fretted it may be by worldly cares, and troubled 
in a shallow way. For suffering does nothing 
for us and gives us nothing, until it takes us 
direct to God. 

We shall see this more clearly, — how suf- 
fering, the deeper it reaches, reveals the more 
of God and of the truth to us, — if we take 
a case. Take the case of a man whom God is 
dealing with by the events of his life, as God 
indeed is dealing with us all. This man, let us 
suppose, meets a loss in his worldly affairs. If 
he is a religious man perhaps the loss brought 
a spiritual gain ; perhaps it had just that secret 
steadying influence which was becoming neces- 
sary ; perhaps for a moment it caused a fear to 
pass through his mind, leaving him a better 
man. That loss or check upon his prosperity 
reminded him that much of every life is beyond 
our control; that God has surely the disposing 
of the lot. 

But if the man to whom this lot has come 
omits to take this private instruction to himself, 
the reverse will do him harm as a man. It will 
only make him closer, harder, and more anxious 



60 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



to recover his ground. We are supposing just 
now that the loss or reverse was not so serious 
as to overwhelm the man, but just enough to 
mean something to him if he were a sensitive 
and religious man, and to irritate him if he 
were a mere man of the world. 

But now let us suppose that the loss, in the 
way of fortune and prospects, which he has 
incurred, is a very serious matter, so serious 
as practically to ruin the man in a worldly way. 
Is it not very frequently the case, — so fre- 
quently as to give us the hint that the thing 
happens not by chance but in obedience to a 
gracious law, — that a man behaves with a cer- 
tain dignity and self-restraint in a day of real 
disaster who would have become merely angry 
and mean-spirited under some small reverse! 
The fact is that troubles the more deeply they 
affect us have the greater chance of doing us 
good. 

And now let us suppose this man who has 
been overwhelmed in worldly difficulties (let us 
suppose him) to be visited by a still deeper 
sorrow. Let us suppose that just when his af- 
fairs are most embarrassed the shadow of death 
falls upon his home. The life of one most dear 
to him is threatened, and he has to pass through 
days and nights of intolerable suspense. You 
would say that that would be an added burden, 
a new load of sorrow. But really it is not. The 



THE PEACE OF GOB 61 



fact is rather that this new and deeper sor- 
row liberates the man from his earlier vexa- 
tions. And that is how God often sets us free 
from our cares, — not by removing our causes 
for care, but by sending us some deeper sorrow 
in whose intenser shadow our unworthy com- 
plainings hide themselves. For we cease to 
complain when we need to pray. We do not 
complain when life, which is in great part God, 
has forced us to our knees. Imagine such a one 
in such an hour, — one, I mean, who is sitting 
waiting while someone most dear to him is hov- 
ering between life and death (imagine such an 
one in such an hour) being consulted by a friend 
far away on some point of business or worldly 
prudence! How unreal all such questions 
would appear to him at such a time ; how paltry 
all such fear and anxieties to him who was 
undergoing a severer strain ! How naturally, — 
and it would be without any affectation, — he 
might write back to his friend: " Do not let 
these things eat up your heart : have no anxiety 
about them. We should only be anxious about 
one thing, and it is whether we are ready to 
suffer according to the will of God. ' ' 

Thus, although it seems strange to people 
who do not know the deeper movements of the 
soul, it was in keeping with a spiritual law, a 
law of compensation by which the inward may 
always be able to counterbalance the outward, 



62 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



that the Apostle who had most to bear was able 
to write to those who were only a little troubled 
and to tell them out of his own heart, how men 
may rise above their cares, — forgetting them 
in some deeper entreaty of the Spirit. " En- 
tertain no anxious cares,' ' he wrote, " but 
throw them all upon God. By your prayer and 
your supplication make your every want known 
to Him. If you do this, then the peace of God, 
far more effective than any forethought or con- 
trivance of man (that passeth understanding), 
will keep watch over your hearts and your 
thoughts in Christ Jesus." And now let us 
consider the Apostle's counsel in this matter, 
carefully and in detail. 

u In nothing be anxious, but in everything 
let out your hearts to God." ' 6 In nothing be 
anxious.' ' Had the Apostle said no more than 
that, his words would have been of no value to 
us. A man has no right to say to another : " do 
not be anxious unless he can say more, un- 
less indeed he can speak of God. If anxiety 
could be removed at a mere word, there would 
be no anxiety in the world. For none know 
better than the care-worn how good it would be 
to have no care. What the Apostle does here 
is to offer, like a physician of the soul, a cer- 
tain treatment for a harassed and anxious 
mind. 

Underlying this counsel you can feel that, 



THE PEACE OF GOB 63 



according to the Apostle, anxiety arises and is 
possible to ns because our heart is in a certain 
condition. We sometimes speak as if anxiety 
were the result of our circumstances and were 
inevitable. But really it is not so : as we shall 
admit if we consider only this which will not 
be disputed by any one, — that things which one 
day have brought anxiety to us, have at some 
other time, when we ourselves were nearer to 
God, brought only a deeper faith and a quieter 
spirit. Anxiety is not the effect of our circum- 
stances upon us ; it is rather our way of looking 
at our circumstances. Anxiety is a spirit, a 
mood, a state of heart, and we are free from 
it only when the good spirit which is its op- 
posite occupies us. The Spirit of anxiety has 
its contradiction and overthrow in the Spirit 
of faith. The habit of anxiety has for its con- 
trary the habit of prayer. 

Think of anxiety; and what do you find it to 
be? What is its essence, what is the thought 
at the heart of anxiety of whatever kind it may 
be? Is it not the spirit of unbelief? Why is 
any one anxious and when? Is it not because 
there is a region of possibilities outside of him 
over which he has no control, yet from which 
he is afraid that evils may come? And is the 
essence of such a mood not simply the spirit 
of unbelief? Are you not in your anxiety act- 
ing and feeling as if that region of possibilities 



64 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



over which you have no control were in the 
hands of no one, and least of all in the hands 
of Eternal Justice and Love! Yes: the spirit 
and heart of anxiety is the denial for the time 
being, or the forgetting, of God. Therefore, its 
cure, our deliverance, comes with calling Him 
to our remembrance, i.e., with prayer. What 
does one wish when one is harassed and anxious 
but to feel that he and all that is really of value 
to him are in good hands, for they are in God's 
hands? And how can that feeling come to me 
and stay with me, when things seem contrary 
in the world and in my lot, except by drawing 
near to God in Jesus Christ, and bethinking 
myself that He who spared not His own Son but 
freely gave Him up for us all, will not fail us 
in our day of need, or if He seem to fail us, it 
is that He is preparing for us some greater 
good, and preparing us to receive it? 

The words of the Apostle in this place do 
more than merely recommend prayer as the way 
of deliverance from the strains and harassing 
of life and of our own hearts. They describe — 
those words of his — the stages through which 
an anxious heart passes as it leaves its troubles 
behind in prayer and settles at last into the 
peace of God. Each word of that sentence, — 
prayer, supplication, thanksgiving, requests, — 
each of these words marks another movement 
in the deepening communion with God. Each 



THE PEACE OF GOD 65 



word marks a stage in the cure and recovery 
of a troubled spirit. 

Suppose that one of those Philippians, in- 
stead of receiving a letter from the Apostle, 
had met him, and that the Apostle had given 
him this counsel by word of mouth. It would 
have been somewhat as follows, for I shall sim- 
ply paraphrase and expand what Paul has writ- 
ten here. " When anxiety like a wave comes 
over you (so he would have said, for so indeed 
he says) and threatens to paralyse your life, 
do not argue against your mood. The first 
thing you must do is to think as earnestly as 
you can about God. Eemind yourself that, con- 
cerning the deep and real things, you have, if 
you will, a Friend in God. Hold hard by that 
thought, for it strikes a silence through the 
troubled soul and gives one leisure to think and 
to recover hope." (That is what the Apostle 
means in the words " by prayer,' ' " in every- 
thing by prayer. ' ' He means, the approach of 
the soul to God, the spirit of trust coming over 
one. Let your life go out to God.) When you 
have done this, we imagine him continuing, you 
will be conscious that you have already lost 
most of your anxieties. You will find that 
many things do not trouble you, now that you 
are in spirit near to God. Indeed, if you open 
your lips it will be not to ask anything, but to 
give thanks : to give thanks that you have One 



66 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



to speak to, One to lean upon. For when we 
are most in earnest, we do not wish God to fill 
our empty hands but rather to hold them. 

And now, says the Apostle, when your heart 
has grown quiet under the shadow of the Al- 
mighty, when you will be disposed to ask noth- 
ing from God except what God moves you to 
ask, now, make your requests known unto Him. 
Pour out your heart: keep nothing back; for 
it was that that made the misery of your 
anxiety; you never could utter it all and so re- 
lieve your Soul. For the reason that anxiety 
so disables us and paralyses us, is that it closes 
our heart against God. In the heat and plan- 
ning and confusion of an anxious mind, God is 
forgotten and such comfort as always comes 
when we look away from ourselves. Whereas 
prayer is the entrance of God into our 
hearts, whose first work in a troubled soul is 
to bring in orderliness and quiet. ' ' The peace 
of God which passeth understanding ' ' — The 
peace of God which is better than any security 
which we may seem to have brought to our- 
selves by our own planning and contrivances, 
the peace of a surrendered soul which is bet- 
ter than the peace which we try to make for 
ourselves by arranging our circumstances to 
our liking; " the peace of God that passeth all 
understanding " shall keep your heart and 
mind. 



THE PEACE OF GOD 67 



Observe one thing more, though it is not new 
to those who know the Scriptures or who have 
had any real human experience. S. Paul does 
not promise here that prayer will alter the facts 
of your life. He does not say that in every 
case the harassing thing will pass away. What 
he does promise, and this never fails, is that 
true prayer will give any of us new heart for 
our life, courage to meet our peculiar trials, 
patience under its checks and crosses, and re- 
covery from its most cruel disasters: that the 
power of God is ours in prayer. What he does 
promise, — and surely we desire nothing more 
meanwhile, — is that the things which formerly 
harassed our minds will cease to harass us if 
we draw near to God in Christ Jesus : that what 
formerly made us anxious will henceforth make 
us pray. 

What we want in our sorest hours is — to have 
Some One to speak to, who knows all that is 
troubling us; that, and this too, — that the 
Great, Wise and Loving God, the Eternal 
Christ is in all and through all and over all. 



vn 



THE SIN OF CAUSING OTHERS TO SIN 

"Woe unto the world because of offences: for it must needs be 
that offences come: but woe to that man by whom the offence 
cometh." S. Matt, xviii : 7. 

IT was like our Lord's method at all times, 
here in these words not to speak in gen- 
eral terms about the evils of the world, but 
to open our eyes to certain particular evils 
for which we ourselves are to be blamed. For 
it may become a snare to us, blunting our own 
quick sense of right and wrong, to be thinking 
too much of the great mass of evil in the world. 
It may bring about, within ourselves, a certain 
depressed and consenting state of mind, — as 
though nothing could now be done by us to 
reduce or to unseat such an ancient and estab- 
lished principle. And from that position — that 
evil is a thing of such long standing and uni- 
versality that it is hopeless for any one person 
to attempt any serious opposition to it, — (from 
that position) it is but a short step to this other, 
which tempts us one by one, that perhaps after 
all we are not called upon to do anything very 
heroic or decisive in the matter. Because it is 

68 



CAUSING OTHERS TO SIN 69 



only a little that the best of us can do to beat 
back the sea of moral evil, we hear many subtle 
voices persuading us not even to do that little. 
And so, by thinking too much about the im- 
mense presence of evil in the world, and too 
little about our own unquenchable sense of right 
and wrong, we become soft and depressed 
and sluggish in our own moral judgments 
and in the demands which we make upon our- 
selves. 

These words of our Lord raise that other 
side of the matter which is our proper concern. 
They speak to us of certain evils which spring 
from our own behaviour, evils for which no 
one is to be charged but ourselves. These words 
bring us back almost violently from a certain 
idle lamenting over evil in general, and bid us 
address ourselves to the actual evils which pro- 
ceed from us and for which we shall be judged. 
" It must needs be that offences come: but woe 
to that man by whom the offence cometh." 

This is a matter which needs to be urged, 
for it is one we do not think about as we should : 
I mean, the sin of causing others to sin. As 
we shall see, if even this one sin — of causing 
others to sin — were known and shunned, we 
should already have gone a great way towards 
the cleansing of the world. 

It is a sin this which, once our eyes have 
been opened to it, is so common and as it seems 



70 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



so inevitable, that the danger is not that we shall 
think too little about it but that we shall dis- 
tress ourselves beyond measure. 

When one comes to think of it, one sees that 
there is no sin that a man may commit which 
does not involve another; that we cannot our- 
selves sin without causing others to sin. You 
sometimes hear men speak as though they were 
responsible only to themselves for the way they 
live. You will hear one say, " I can surely do 
as I like. I'm not asking any one to follow me. 
If I am doing wrong I shall bear the penalty. 
My behaviour in no other's business." But 
how untrue all that is! Not to speak of the 
sins which we can commit only through the 
hurt of others, involving them with ourselves, 
how very far from the truth it is, that we can 
any of us bear the whole penalty of our sin, 
that no injury need come to others through our 
wrong-doing! It is quite true that those who 
do wrong because of us, because of our invita- 
tion, or example, or influence, will have to an- 
swer and be troubled for their own sin; but 
just because we shall have to answer and be 
troubled for our sin, we shall have to answer 
and be troubled for that consequence of our 
sin that it caused them to sin. 

Indeed it is this which brings the most lasting 
torment into our soul when at length it has de- 
parted from its evil ways and come to peace 



CAUSING OTHERS TO SIN 71 



with God: — we see then how others have been 
entangled with us in evil. 

We have now repented, we have found God 
and a new beginning; but what of those who 
were partners with us, or companions in evil, 
who had not, it may be, some last restraint 
which God could reinforce to save them, or who 
overcame that last restraint and went their 
way; what of them, — whom we in our headlong 
days caused to offend? It is as we think of 
these things as they really are, and we will not 
think of them as they really are until we our- 
selves have been converted from all sinful ways 
to God, (it is as we think of these things) and 
feel our helplessness to undo what is past, or 
recover those or make amends to them who 
through us have erred, it is then that we know 
what our sin involved. We are glad even to 
feel the torments of our wrong-doing. We are 
ashamed to be at peace when those others who 
sinned through us are out in the darkness where 
by right we should be with them sharing an 
equal retribution. This indeed is the consid- 
eration which in penitent souls provokes to 
tears, — the knowledge that we have injured 
others beyond our power to repair ; that through 
us, and through us alone it may be, they lost 
their way; that we have no right to be happy 
even in God's forgiveness until we have sought 
to make amends to them, until we have con- 



72 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



fessed ourselves to them and have endured their 
contempt and indignation it may be, or their 
forgiveness and goodwill. And it is this same 
thought, that we in our sin provoked others to 
sin, which through all our regenerate days binds 
us by a tender sorrow to Jesus Christ and keeps 
us humble to the end and touched with a cer- 
tain sadness in our memories. Thus through 
all our days, unless we have once again lost 
our soul and forgotten ourselves, we cherish 
a hope which kindles many a prayer, that God 
will mercifully restrain the evil which we sowed 
in others' lives; that He will do for them and 
us what we cannot do; and that one day 
here on this earth, or if not here, then in that 
world where all that we would, shall have its 
way, He may permit us to bow our heads and 
lament ourselves and ask forgiveness from 
those whom in our unregenerate days with a 
high hand we caused to offend. 

I repeat: once our eyes have been opened 
to see how as a matter of fact " no man liveth 
to himself," how it is of the very nature of 
most sins that they involve others, how we may 
easily have set up an evil spirit in the life of 
another, and how that evil spirit once in pos- 
session of that other's soul may run riot there 
in a way which we did not reckon upon; — once 
our eyes have been opened to these things, the 
danger is not that we shall think too lightly 



CAUSING OTHERS TO SIN 73 



of this sin of causing' others to sin but that 
we shall think of it unduly and with a certain 
despair of ourselves. 

But he is a poor preacher whose warnings 
serve only to dishearten his hearers and make 
them feel at a loss. God takes no pleasure in 
reducing us to confusion. It is one bright proof 
of the forgiveness which is present in all His 
dealings with us that He does not shut up any 
one with his past mistakes and sins, but is 
quick to see our penitence and to set before us 
an open door. And so in this matter we must 
be content all of us to leave with God, with 
Jesus Christ, many an obligation, many a cause 
for sorrow and despondency, because with re- 
gard to certain things we have now no power 
whatever to undo what has been done or to 
make amends. These are the burdens of the 
soul which Jesus Christ will graciously take 
from you when you seek His Face by night. 

It is the end and purpose of all God's warn- 
ings not to entangle us but to teach us the truth 
and to help us in what remains. And so here. 
" Woe be to the man by whom the offence 
cometh." If such words bring any of us to a 
standstill because they convict us, we must find 
our peace with God through our Lord Jesus 
Christ. For these and for us all, however, the 
words have a further use. They speak as 
though all the evil in the world proceeded from 



74 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



human hearts ; that one smites another with the 
disease and taint. In conclusion, therefore, let 
me consider with you some ways in which we 
may be guilty of the sin of causing others to 
sin — that we may be on our guard and that we 
may repent. 

I shall not speak of the horrible wicked- 
ness of inviting another to join you in some 
course which you know to be either frankly 
evil or perilous to the human soul. I shall not 
speak of that, although it must be said that 
there is that in these cavernous hearts of ours 
which may find a secret joy in making others 
or in finding others no better or worse than we 
are. It is a feeling which ought to cover us 
with shame if we are conscious of any satisfac- 
tion in the sinful state of another. And that 
is a possible feeling, it would seem, until it has 
been dealt with by God. But deliberately to 
tempt another to commit a sin is to be an agent 
of the Evil One. One would like to believe that 
it is not common: though one hears of it and 
reads of its occurrence: — middle-aged men 
tempting those who are younger, encouraging 
them by their apparent freedom from care, by 
their absence of scruples, to embark on a moral 
career which can only be ruinous at the last; 
older boys tainting the minds of younger boys ; 
those who know the world breaking their miser- 
able knowledge to those who are still happily 



CAUSING OTHERS TO SIN 75 



ignorant : — these are among the ways in which 
one may sin this heavy sin of causing another 
to offend. 

But short of that, which should not be so 
much as named amongst us, there are many 
who have no wish to injure others, to poison 
their imagination or to destroy within them 
that great defence and safeguard of the soul — 
one's first innocence, who do not yet see that 
their own behaviour has just that effect, and 
ought to have that effect, and that if it has 
not that effect it is by the grace of God and 
in spite of them. We all live and learn; we 
learn by seeing others live. We are all of us 
daily offering ourselves as patterns. 

At this point we come upon a matter about 
which much has always been said. I mean the 
effect upon others of seeing persons who have 
a name for character and religion live unwor- 
thily or do some wrong. One often hears the in- 
consistencies of professed Christians urged by 
people who have themselves no wish to be seri- 
ous, as the reason for their way of living. But 
deducting all that, which in their case is only 
a pretence, there is in truth much in what they 
say although they may not be the people to say 
it. It is incalculable, the evil that is done when 
the world discovers a dark blot in the life of 
one reputed to be good. Then the Philistines 
rejoice and many who were only waiting for 



76 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



some encouragement think they have received 
it. But the fall of one held in honour is ever 
a heavy blow. For every good man in the world 
is a kind of security to all of us for God, for 
the good soul in all things: and when a good 
man has fallen, there is a tremor of insecurity 
in the faith of even the most sure. A man can 
do no more grievous injury to those about him 
and to the time in which he lives than to have 
given cause to people to suspect that there is 
no real goodness in the world. " It must needs 
be that offences come: but woe to the man by 
whom the offence cometh." 

These words convey a warning to us all; 
for we are none of us without influence and 
a following. But there are those to whom they 
ought to come with a serious and particular 
force. I mean those on whom God has laid the 
responsibility and honour of guiding and form- 
ing the lives of others. I mean such as are 
teachers or guides, public men ; above all I mean 
those who are parents or who have homes. 

Take these last. As we grow older, we see 
very clearly that our entire character is being 
formed by our attitude and behaviour towards 
the few human beings — the one or two or three 
— with whom we are daily coming into contact. 
We are being formed by them and they by us. 
"We give and take. If there is one who shares 
our thoughts, we shall soon have one common 



BLESSEDNESS OF MOEAL SOEROW 81 



unless life has taught us nothing — which we do 
well to call to mind. We should know it by 
name and when our life is becoming foolish or 
frivolous, when we feel in some earnest moment 
that we are drifting, losing ourselves in the 
small successes and ambitions of the world, we 
should resolutely call that thing to our remem- 
brance, — as a youth in a far-off land might look 
hard at a relic from home to save his soul — 
that thing which in a moment can strike a si- 
lence through our vain thoughts and can fill 
us with one supreme thought concerning the 
deepest matters, such as leaves us in the Pres- 
ence of God. 

If a life is ever to be very serious and 
deep and if it is to remain real in its testi- 
mony to God, that life must always keep within 
the shadow, within the call and rebuke of its 
own experience of God. It must have its roots 
set firmly in one spiritual crisis which, either 
because it was the man's first experience of 
God or because it was his most unmistakable 
experience, was really the significant crisis of 
his life, the authentic word of God to him. All 
the after life of such a man must be built upon 
that decisive experience, must be the unfolding, 
the expression, the deeper apprehension and ful- 
filment of what came to the man in that great 
day of his soul. A true spiritual career can 
have only one root. If the man forgets his 



82 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



own great experience and instead of finding 
ever new nourishment for his soul in God 
through that particular channel; if he rushes 
hither and thither trying to support his own 
religious life with odds and ends from other 
people's experiences, such a man has ceased to 
have any personal religion; what he has is only 
a thing of scraps, like a book of cuttings com- 
pared with one real outpouring of the soul. 
When you enter a cathedral — if you are sensi- 
tive to such influences — you are conscious of 
one distinct feeling, one impression; and as 
long as you remain within its walls that one 
impression keeps growing upon you. The 
building is great and affecting because it is one. 
It is loyal in every detail of it to the conception 
of the whole. It expresses one thought about 
God and man's relation to God and nothing is 
admitted which would conflict with that thought. 

And so, our lives assuredly would be truer, 
more real, and would bring with them a 
surer testimony to God if we were more faith- 
ful to our own personal history, more faithful 
to our own most serious hour and to the vision 
or word of God which came to us then. That 
we should ever have before us. A man who 
has been pardoned must never lose the humility 
and the tone of charity which are becoming to 
one with his history. The fact that he was for- 
given must lay the plan and decide the lines of 



ENTEBING INTO LIFE MAIMED 95 



also we try to put new heart into those who 
have failed. 

Now in all these efforts it is one thing we are 
seeking to bring about, — we are trying to per- 
suade those to whom we are speaking to believe 
in the soul, in God, in what is still left; not to 
lose their faith or their happiness because of 
some fact or circumstance; that a hostile fact 
is, properly considered, only a challenge to 
one's personal energy; it is an instruction to 
a man to call out his reserves. And truly, his- 
tory — confining ourselves for a moment to secu- 
lar history — has many an invigorating illustra- 
tion of how a defect, a limitation, became an 
opportunity, of how a certain pressure upon 
the flesh awakened the soul, as the crushed 
grape yields wine; of how a certain embarrass- 
ment of circumstances had only the effect of 
putting a man upon his mettle, leading him to 
discover new kingdoms of the Spirit and to 
behold the Face of God. Ealeigh writing the 
" History of the World " in the Tower of Lon- 
don; Bunyan, his " Pilgrim's Progress " in 
Bedford Jail; John Addington Symonds, his 
" Eenaissance " while seeking safety from con- 
sumption among the Alps; our own Stevenson, 
a life-long invalid, writing all his plucky and 
pathetic essays and verses under a certain 
shadow of death ; — what are these but so many 
examples on a lower plane of the law within 



96 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



these words of Jesus which speak of entering 
into life maimed? Doubtless the most beautiful 
examples of this law are unknown to fame. God 
alone knows what obscure but glorious victories 
are being gained each day and everywhere by 
the soul over the bondage and limitation of cir- 
cumstance. — Stories like one which I heard 
some time ago of a little girl born blind and 
deaf and dumb. Later on in life she lost also 
the use of her hands. This was a heavy cross, 
for now she was deprived of the power to read 
— the precious power by which until then she 
had kept her mind happy and awake. But 
truly, — " what a piece of work is a man! how 
noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! " — 
A kind friend saw how the book might be fixed, 
and the poor brave girl learned to read it by 
the pressure of her lips upon the page ! These 
are the things which God must see and take 
note of, the things perhaps which intercede for 
the world, disposing God, if we may say so in 
reverence, to be patient with us and not to lose 
heart over us. 

The fact is, as we see the moment we look 
deeply into the matter, it is to our limitations 
under God that we owe all the expressions, ut- 
terances, disclosures of our hidden and mysteri- 
ous life. It is because of our limitations and 
the conflict of these with our essential nature 
that we have music, art, poetry and prayer. It 



ENTERING INTO LIFE MAIMED 97 



is because our boundless soul is meanwhile 
bound somehow that we sing and make melody 
in our heart. In all these it is the indomitable 
spirit beating its wings against its ancient bars. 
These are for faith among the proofs and 
pledges of a fuller life elsewhere. These are 
6 6 The Earnests of the Spirit, ' ' the songs in the 
night until the day break and the shadows flee 
away. This is the very quality of faith itself — 
in faith you have the imperishable spirit of 
man, stirred and kept alive surely by the Father 
of Spirits else it had long ceased to contend, — 
the imperishable spirit protesting against its 
limitations, loving One whom we have never 
seen, dwelling by the energy of imagination and 
hope, even now in the element of the Unseen, 
in " a house not made with hands.' ' 

And now what is the message that comes to 
ourselves from these words of our Lord and 
from so many like them which He also spake? 
Is it not just this, that since a weakness, a 
limitation, a sorrow working privately, since 
these give the best, perhaps the only point of 
communion between the grace of God in Jesus 
Christ and our personal life, we ought to ap- 
proach Him by that very way, — by the way of 
our weakness, our limitation, our private and 
characteristic need. That is the message, — that 
just at the point where we are maimed, disabled, 
limited, undone, that just there we should wait 



98 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



upon God in humble patience. It is because 
we communicate with God and deal with Christ 
by the way of our personal needs, that our 
knowledge of Christ becomes so intimate and 
sure, and we are able to use language concern- 
ing the goodness of God which outsiders con- 
sider excessive or over-confident. They forget 
that we know Christ according to our faith, and 
the measure of our faith is just the depth of 
our need. And so it happens that the love of 
Christ becomes as personal and assured as the 
trouble of the soul which led us to seek His 
Face, and still keeps us near to Him. 

The Bible speaks of a sin which doth so easily 
beset each of us in particular. Well, it is over 
that particular sin that the battle of our life 
is to be fought out. If we fail there, we fail 
everywhere. For a man's love to God, a man's 
true character indeed, is not tested by all the 
requirements of religion or by all the command- 
ments; but usually only by a few, by three or 
two or one. And we must judge ourselves by 
our behaviour in that one particular. There 
are many sins to which, it may be, we are not 
at all disposed. How therefore we behave in 
regard to those sins casts no light upon our 
real character or piety. But I repeat there may 
be one or two points in moral or spiritual prac- 
tice where we are fiercely besieged and in our 
case these hold the key to all our defences. 



ENTERING INTO LIFE MAIMED 99 



Overcome there, we have yielded everywhere, 
for we have yielded at the one point where we 
were really assailed. 

And the converse is also true : if there, at the 
one or two points in moral or spiritual practice 
where we know we are tempted to give way, if 
there we stand fast, invoking and finding the 
help of God, then our entire soul is built up in 
strength and beauty. Well, it is those one or 
two points whereon for each of us the fate of 
the battle of life hangs : and it is through those 
one or two points that we must one by one come 
into our personal knowledge of God and Christ 
and the Holy Ghost. 

You know the natural history of the pearl? 
How one grain of sand, it may be, finds its way 
into the shell, creating a wound and a disturb- 
ance. Thereupon the shell summons mysteri- 
ous forces to the threatened point, and these 
deal with and transform that intruding speck 
of sand. And they so deal with it, they so sur- 
round it and penetrate it that one day inside 
that shell where once there was a wound there 
is now a pearl. 

Thus is it, for the most part, we enter into the 
spiritual life, — by the way of some wound; we 
enter into life maimed. S. John in describing 
the heavenly city tells us that there are twelve 
gates leading into it: and each gate, he tells us, 
is a pearl. 



100 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



My brethren, there are, thank God, innumera- 
ble gates into the life of holy faith, and yet, each 
gate, I am sure, has the quality of the pearl — 
for a pearl is the transformation of a wound. 
" Come therefore and let us return unto the 
Lord." " Cast thy burden upon the Lord and 
He will sustain thee." " Thou, Lord, hast 
made man out of the dust. ' ' 



THE SHAME OF BEING NEUTRAL 111 



decision, it is the intention of our choice which 
God considers. We may have chosen wrongly 
as time proves ; but we have not chosen sinfully 
if we chose with a pure intention. In fact, let 
us be on our guard against exaggerating the dif- 
ficulties of a holy and faithful life. In the jour- 
ney of our souls, there are always lamps by the 
way : and certainly there is a lamp at every 
parting of the ways—a lamp in some remem- 
bered Word of God, in some incident in the life 
of our Blessed Lord, or in some word or prin- 
ciple or parable of His. Or it may be that 
something shines upon us at the moment from 
the memory of our own beloved ones from what 
we know they would have us do. — But God hath 
not left Himself without witness in any one of 
us, so that when this challenge comes to us 
again, ' ' Who is on the Lord's side? " we have 
each one of us light enough and understanding 
enough to know exactly how we ought to feel. 



XI 



THE GEACE OF GOD IN SPECIAL MO- 
MENTS OF OUR LIFE 

"Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while ye have 
the light, lest darkness come upon you. . . . While ye have light, 
believe in the light. . . . These things spake Jesus and departed." 
S. John xii: 35, 36. 




} HERE is a tide in the affairs of men 
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to 



fortune; 

Omitted, all the voyage of their life 
Is spent in shallows and in miseries. 

. . . We must take the current when it serves, 
Or lose our ventures." 

Those are well-known lines, — lines which 
we used to repeat long before we under- 
stood all their truth. They tell us that in the 
course of every life there come times of oppor- 
tunity, one time at least, — times when almost 
anything is possible; that it is our wisdom to 
lay hold on these opportunities, for, says Shake- 
speare, if we let them pass by, we have lost 

something for ever. Whatever success or ful- 

112 



GRACE OF GOD IN OUR LIFE 113 



ness of life we may subsequently attain to, it 
will always be less than it would have been if 
we had made for the open seas when first the 
tide was full for us. That is one of the truths 
of our life. It is a line from the book of wis- 
dom — a line which those who know what life is 
repeat to those who are still upon the threshold. 
But perhaps we never feel how true it is until 
we are old enough to remember tides which we 
ourselves have missed. There are some things 
which we do not see clearly until they are be- 
yond our reach — our opportunities for example. 
Now it was just this truth — in its deepest and 
most serious aspect — which our blessed Lord 
was seeking to impress upon His hearers, when 
He spoke the words of our text. He was telling 
them what we know is so true and so serious 
for those who can understand it, that times of 
opportunity do come to every human soul, — 
times when a man sees his way, sees what he 
ought to do, what he ought to believe, what he 
ought to be. These times of opportunity, of 
light, come to men in various ways, — very sub- 
tle and fugitive they may be. But they do come 
and they come from God. They are never so 
faint and shadowy but we are aware of them, 
aware that a new force is working within us, 
that something new is being offered which we 
have it in our power to embrace or to refuse. 
Well, says our Lord, those moments pass, those 



114 AT CLOSE QUAETEBS 



lights go out, — and the last state of that man is 
worse than the first. And so He is warning 
people — warning us also — in the words of our 
text, not to trifle with our own serious moods, 
not to let go any new resolution which may be 
wrestling with us, until it has blessed us; for 
indeed it is God Who is there wrestling with 
us. Those are moments in which, if we use them 
well, we may take a distinct step out of our old 
ways, and gain a victory in the region of eternal 
things, the fruits of which shall stay with us for 
ever. 

At first sight our Lord's words do not seem 
to have any real connection with what goes be- 
fore. The people had asked Him about Him- 
self, how He could be the Messiah and yet be 
about to die, whereas according to the Scrip- 
tures, the Messiah was to abide for ever. They 
showed Jesus their difficulty in accepting Him 
as being what He claimed to be. But Jesus did 
not answer them on their own level. He said, 
" Yet a little while is the light with you; walk 
while ye have the light . . . while ye have 
light, believe in the light." And having said 
this, He left them. It was a strange answer; 
and we are not sure that the people saw what 
a real answer it was, and what a light it cast 
upon their state of mind at the moment. But 
when we look into those words, we seem to see 
how it was a profound answer to those men if 



GEACE OF GOD IN OUE LIFE 115 



they were sincere, and a rebuke to them if they 
were only trifling. 

We find in the words a wonderful rule for 
men in our own day and for ourselves if ever 
things in this world or in our experience should 
arise to perplex our faith. 

The very fact that these men were raising 
difficulties in the way of their receiving Christ 
for what He claimed to be, indicated to Jesus 
that He had already made a real impression 
upon them. There was something within them 
which was responding to His appeal. There was 
something within them — although it was only 
so far as faint as a whisper — which was an- 
swering Him. Jesus had begun to interfere 
with their lives. He had awakened a misgiving 
in their minds. He had planted a light within 
them, so to speak. And now they were only 
wanting an excuse to blow out that light, to 
suppress that infant voice which was pleading 
for Jesus within their souls. But Jesus would 
give them no help. And so, He seemed to pay 
no heed to their words, but passed on and dealt 
with their thoughts. He did not answer the dif- 
ficulty which they proposed to Him, but took up 
the controversy where, as He knew, it stood. 
It was as if He had said: " Take care. You 
are just now on the edge of a monstrous de- 
cision. There is a light within you. You are 
not at ease with yourselves in your hostility to 



116 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



Me. I pray you be faithful to that feeling. 
Walk while ye have the light. While ye have 
light, believe in the light. Yield to that faint 
voice : welcome it, give it a home in your heart 
or it will die away. Rise, for your light is come 
and the glory of the Lord is risen upon you." 
And with that Jesus went away, leaving it, as 
He always does, as God always does, to men 
themselves to work out their own salvation, 
knowing now that God is working within them. 
For it is simply the fact that it is left with 
us, whether we shall be true to ourselves or 
false ; whether, on the one hand, we shall walk 
in the light, or, on the other, shall neglect the 
light until it flicker and die, or turn angrily upon 
it and dash it down. 

But leaving the special circumstances in 
which our Lord gave us these words, though 
really they supply the basis of all that we are 
about to say, let us consider the words as a 
counsel for ourselves, — for it is a counsel which, 
the older we grow, appears to us the more mo- 
mentous. What lives we should all have at- 
tained if we had only taken on trust what we 
have come to learn in vain regrets ! ' i Walk 
while ye have the light. . . . While ye have 
the light, believe in the light." 

It is assumed here that there are times when 
light breaks upon us. By " light " I mean the 
light of God, of truth, the sense of the Unseen 



GRACE OF GOD IN OUR LIFE 117 



World and all that that implies. I mean those 
various lights which all have their source and 
their explanation in Jesus Christ. I say, then, 
that there are times when light of this kind does 
fall across our lives. These times are known 
only to ourselves. They may be vague, insub- 
stantial, fugitive, like lights upon the sea — that 
look at us earnestly for one moment and then 
seem to us to go out in the blackness. But the 
point is, lights do reach us now and then which 
had their home in God. He hath not left Him- 
self without witness in any man. There are 
times when we cannot but think seriously : there 
are times when we are pulled up on our way. 
Moments come to us when the best seems possi- 
ble, even to those who have gone far astray. 
Something overtakes us in our life which makes 
our heart tender, and that is God's chance. 
Then some word comes home to us, and the 
things which we had been living for in this 
world seem poor and empty; or, as we see them 
now, they have the tint of hell. I cannot tell 
you all the ways this thing may happen, when 
light comes and the soul struggles to be born. 
" The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou 
hear est the sound thereof and canst not tell 
whence it cometh or whither it goeth : so is every 
one that is born of the Spirit. " The point is 
once more that these things do happen. It 
would be strange indeed if they did not happen, 



118 AT CLOSE QUAKTEKS 



if they were not always happening and happen- 
ing everywhere — if we had only the faith to be- 
lieve it and to act npon it. It wonld be strange 
if in a world which is encompassed by God, and 
where the Holy Ghost has taken up His abode, 
it would be strange if hearts were not always 
being moved, troubled, entreated, brought into 
a mood of tenderness, — a mood of fear or of 
shame or of remorse, and thus made soft and 
keen at the touch of Him Who is everywhere. 
These moments do come, and it is by our be- 
haviour then that souls are redeemed unto God 
or are ruined. After one of those moments, the 
next thing we do has the effect of a seal upon 
soft wax. The mark of that next thing remains. 

" I crossed a moor with a name of its own 

And a certain use in the world, no doubt; 
Yet a hand's breadth of it shines alone 

Mid the blank miles round about. 
For there I picked up on the heather 

And there I put inside my breast 
A moulted feather, an eagle's feather, 

Well, I forget the rest/' 

Now, how is it that so little comes of all those 
fine moments which, if we believe in God, must 
be continually visiting human souls! How is it 
that most men, and we ourselves so often, miss 
the tide? 



GRACE OF GOD IN OUR LIFE 119 



I leave entirely out of account just now 
those who, when this thing happens to them 
which we are calling light, when they are taken 
seriously, deliberately turn their back upon the 
good thing as if they had made up their mind 
to reject the overtures of God for ever. So 
long as that mood remains, we must leave them 
as they desire to be, i.e., to themselves. There 
are others, however, who have no mind to put 
away for ever the suggestions and inspirations 
of God. They are aware that moments of op- 
portunity do come to them: they even believe 
that they come from God, and that it would be 
well for them to " walk while they have the 
light.' ' And yet somehow they miss the full 
blessing, — they stand still. Now, can we not 
say, at least in the case of many, exactly how 
this happens? 

The reason, in the case of some, is that 
they are quite satisfied with the mere feeling 
that they ought to do something. They take 
credit to themselves for having such keenness 
of perception. And certainly it is better to 
have hours in our life when we are aware of 
God, than to pass through life with our souls 
heavy and asleep. But it is not better to have 
seen what is good and to have let it pass. If 
this is repeated, if, when a high feeling is pro- 
voked, it is again and again thwarted and be- 
trayed, the soul of that person is acquiring a 



::: 



AT CLOSE QEAETEES 



character so crooks ". : sincere, that some 
fierce discipline will be needed if it is ever to 
become simple and real. It is a danger this 
which we must be on our guard against: the 
danger of feeling keenly without doing any- 
thing, the danger of feeling and yet not allow- 
ing those feelings to affect our will. Let us re- 
member that the un fin ished is not hi ng. To 
have felt the powers of the world to come is 
no more to be taken as the surrender of the will 
to Jesns Christ than to look np at a mountain 
is the same as to have climbed to the top of it. 

To feel *' merely has no worth at all. It is 
probably due to yonr temperament, or to some 
particular circumstance, or to (rod; and in no 
case can yon take any credit for it. To feel " 
is only to become aware of what yon are to do 
or to be : bnt it is not even one step towards 
the mark. 

Even in matters which come short of the 
deepest matter, we have all seen instances of 



the sad consequences to people of being content 
with their feelings and dreams and prospects 
and never taking the pains to translate them 
into firm and actual facts. This is the peculiar 
snare of all sanguine people, so that these usu- 
ally disappoint the promise of their early years. 
In the University it is the student of good nat- 
ural parts who talks well and who. if he cared, 



could take a high place: yet somehow he does 



GRACE OF GOD IN OUR LIFE 121 



not, and in after life lie always seems to miss. 
In literature it is the author of many unwritten 
books who is always planning a really great 
work, until all his friends are sad about him. 
In business it is the man who builds castles in 
the air. In common life it is the man who could 
" do anything, " and when his chance comes, he 
cannot bend himself to one real effort, but finds 
that a resolute will — like Rome — was not built 
in a day. In short it is the man whose future is 
behind him. 

Now there is the same danger in regard to 
this deepest matter, the relation of our whole 
life to J esus Christ. There is a whole world of 
difference between feeling that life is a serious 
thing and that some day we had better come 
to terms with ourselves and with certain un- 
quiet thoughts in our own minds; I say there 
is a whole world of difference between that and 
a man's laying open his heart for Christ to 
enter and henceforth to rule. We read that 
when in the end of the days God utters His 
approval, He will say, not " well-dreamed," not 
" well-intended/' but " well done." — 

We often speak together of " the passing 
of time," and how we are all getting older, 
some getting old. And all right-minded people 
speak of these things with a certain serious- 
ness. Now what is it that makes the passing 
of time a solemn thing to contemplate! Oh, I 



122 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



know many reasons, change, death and all those 
incidents of our chequered course. Yet, if we 
believe in God, and ourselves have laid our hopes 
in Christ, we should have an answer for such 
fears. It is not really because time is passing, 
that we should be so seriously-minded as we 
think of it. No ! On the whole time does well 
to pass : we cannot be too far away from many 
things. 

Nor is it that since time is passing, soon there 
will be no time left. We who have eternity will 
always have time enough. No! What makes 
the passing of time a serious matter even for 
those who have a sure faith in God is this: 
In this life of ours things are to be done in 
their own season. There is a time for one thing 
and another time for another. And if a thing 
is not done in its own time, perhaps it must 
remain for ever undone, certainly it can never 
be so well done thereafter. For example : take 
the stage of our life called youth. Youth has 
its own snares, its own passions, and the rest. 
Well, if during that time we do not bring our 
wills under the Control of God and in those 
days of heat and stress incline to holiness, what 
happens? This happens : our youth passes and 
the temptations of youth pass. But we have 
not learned our lesson. We may think we have 
mastered the peculiar trials of youth. It is not 
so : we are older. That is all. We have learned 



GRACE OF GOD IN OUR LIFE 123 



nothing. Our soul has missed a season which 
in the nature of things cannot come back. Yes : 
that is why we do well to speak seriously of the 
passing of time : for it is the passing of certain 
opportunities. 

In view of considerations such as these and 
others of a more sombre hue which I do not 
dwell upon, we do well to pay heed to our Lord's 
counsel to people in His day. Let us walk so 
long as the light is with us. Let us take care 
to realize our dreams; to work out those sug- 
gestions, those inspirations, those " lights " by 
which God is ever witnessing to Himself within 
us. Let us never suffer a real emotion to 
evaporate until it has borne down upon our 
will and thus has helped us. 

Let us strive to work out our life according 
to the pattern shown us on the Mount. 

We have all read the story of Felix listen- 
ing to Paul, listening rather to his own con- 
science and to God while Paul was speaking — 
which is the only profitable way of hearing. 
Poor Felix was carrying at the time much fuel 
in his soul and Paul's word was fire to it. And 
the fire kindled, and Felix, had he only endured, 
had he only clung to the vision of a pure Felix 
which was dawning on him, would have leapt to 
the breast of God with a cry. But no! He 
was content with trembling — which is nothing — 
even the devils do as much. He trembled and 



124 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



said to Paul — Go ! Go ! — and so he shut to the 
door in the face of God. 

True Felix said, " Go thy way for this time. 
When I have a convenient season, I will call for 
thee." But that was only his courtesy. It 
meant nothing at all. 

' ' A little while is the light with you. Walk 
while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon 
you." These things spake Jesus, and de- 
parted. 



XII 



THE WISDOM OF VOWS 

' ' I will lift up mine eyes. " Ps. cxxi : 1. 

YOU will always find the heart and message 
of a psalm in the opening words. You 
have the end of the whole matter at the begin- 
ning. When yon consider what a psalm is, and 
how it came to be written, you will see that this 
is bound to be true, — the message is bound to 
come first. 

For every psalm is a soliloquy. In every^ 
psalm we have a man wrestling with himself, 
and wrestling with himself, at least for a time, 
in the dark. There he sits thinking, thinking 
about himself, about something that has hap- 
pened, until at last light breaks upon him. He 
sees his way or he gives up thinking because 
his mind simply refuses to agonize further — for 
there is a limit beyond which we cannot endure 
another moment's distress; — or the man re- 
members something, something which he had all 
the time been leaving out of his argument, 
something which changes everything, the sense 
of God, for example. At this point his soul 

125 



126 AT CLOSE QUABTEKS 



swings round into peace and quietness, that 
peace and quietness which we have, no matter 
how difficult life may still be for us, when we 
see our way, when we are ready to act. And 
it usually happens that in the opening words 
of the psalm the man puts down this resolution, 
this new point of view which visited him in his 
distress and opened up a way back to healthy 
and faithful human living. 

Again and again the conclusion of a psalm 
is given in the very words with which this one 
begins, namely, ' * I will " I will lift up mine 
eyes " I will remember " I will say to my 
soul," and so on. In short, the conclusion of 
many of the psalms, and in almost all of them 
in which you have the soul of a man wrestling 
with some shadow of itself, is of the nature of 
a vow. Belief comes to him in his lonely dis- 
tress when suddenly he sees something which 
he never saw before, or which he had forgotten. 
And in a moment, and with his whole being, he 
perceives that that for him is the way. 

Let us speak then for a few minutes of two 
things : (1) of vows, and (2) of this vow. 

1. It is difficult to say for what reasons vows 
have fallen into disuse among us. It may very 
well be that, in the more glowing days of faith, 
a vow seemed a formal and restraining thing. 

Or it may have seemed to our fathers that 
there might be something that ministered to 



THE WISDOM OF VOWS 127 



pride in the taking of vows and in the perform- 
ance of them, something which might deceive 
people into supposing that because they were 
able to promise certain things and to perform 
them, they were in all matters, or in any matter, 
masters of their fate. 

Or the taking of vows and the fulfilment of 
them may have fallen into discredit as a spirit- 
ual method because of this: that a vow which 
had been willingly and happily assumed, might, 
later on, be paid in a grudging and reluctant 
spirit, and thus carry no blessing with it, but 
rather a curse. 

Or vows may very well have been abused, — a 
man vowing to do some thing which seemed to 
people to be a severity in one aspect of his life, 
in order that he might let himself go in some 
other aspect dearer to his own inclinations. 

For reasons of these kinds, vows may quite 
justifiably and necessarily have fallen under 
suspicion. And yet there is such a truth under- 
lying the ancient habit which serious people 
who know themselves have followed of taking 
upon themselves vows, and of holding them- 
selves to those vows, that perhaps we to-day 
are hindering our own growth in religion, and 
confining ourselves to a certain well-established 
commonplaceness of moral achievement, by neg- 
lecting the whole method of vows. 

The whole wisdom of vows rests upon the 



128 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



incontrovertible fact of our moral and emo- 
tional life that there are moments when we are 
above ourselves, above our average level of 
feeling. In those unusual moments, too, far 
from it being the case that we are not ourselves, 
we are more truly ourselves than in our average 
condition. They are the moments indeed, when, 
in our Lord's own words concerning the prodi- 
gal son, we come to ourselves and for a blessed 
space of time we are ourselves. In our Lord's 
charitable view that prodigal son was not him- 
self, was not living his true life, when he was 
going to pieces in a strange country. He came 
to himself, he had a glimpse of himself, in that 
moment when in the very shame of his sur- 
roundings he shuddered and repented and de- 
termined to go home. And, according to our 
Lord's perfect insight, at the moment when the 
prodigal son caught a glimpse of himself, he 
took upon himself what was virtually a vow: 
' 6 I will arise and go to my father. ' ' 

Now by the infinite grace of God which is 
mixed up in the events and circumstances of 
the life of every one, moments of this kind do 
arise when we see — sometimes even so clearly 
that we cannot bear to look that way — where 
we were going wrong, or when we see where 
we may go right with a rightness which we 
have never yet striven for. There are moments 
of tenderness, moments of gratitude, moments 



THE WISDOM OF VOWS 129 



when, for any one of a thousand delicate and 
precious reasons, some generous flood may be 
let loose within us. Well, those are the great 
moments when we may rise above ourselves 
and leave our poorer selves for ever behind. 
In such moments our profounder life — our sub- 
conscious life, the life which, it may be, takes 
up its journey when death sets it free to act — 
is crying for utterance, for action; our ideal 
life is striving to carry us away in the spirit. 
Those are the moments in which to come under 
vows, the moments in which to commit ourselves 
beyond ourselves and in the line, as we see 
clearly, of our greatness. 

For in this vast world, we are like people out 
upon the hills making for their journey's end. 
We pass through a tract of mist, in which we 
can see only the very path for our feet, and 
when we come to a place where paths diverge, 
we are at a loss and full of misgiving. But a 
blessed moment comes, when the mist clears, 
when the cloud rolls away from the face of the 
sun, and there to the right we see our way 
stretching plain for miles and miles, and we 
note some eminence or projection which we 
shall encounter later on and by which we 
shall know that so far all is well. The clouds 
may gather about us once again ; on the way of 
life they are sure to gather again; but if, in 
the bright hour, in the hour of our uplifted 



130 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



feeling, we have marked our way, let us hold 
hard to it through the mist and every step will 
take us to the goal which we in our best mo- 
ments had proposed. 

I recommend to you, therefore, this ancient 
method of taking vows and paying them to the 
letter. We have all of us our better moments, 
our more real and tender moments ; we have all 
of us another side to our life, a better side; and 
sometimes, — we may say this without any 
pride, — we are aware of it. It may require 
some severe discipline at the hands of life so 
to purify us, so to set us apart, that we become 
aware of this holier, deeper, personality, which 
is our true self. It may take a severe illness 
or the passing away of some intolerable sus- 
pense, or the sudden painful discovery that we 
have been living far away from Christ, to make 
us gentle and real and soft at heart. 

And so these things come, and God, we be- 
lieve, is behind them. And why do they come, 
if not in order that we may yield ourselves up 
freely to them, in order that in those lonely and 
real hours when we see very well what life is 
and what we have been making of it, we may 
commit ourselves there and then to something 
beyond ourselves, taking that leap not in the 
dark but in the light which is the only way of 
life? 

2. And now observe what precisely was the 



THE WISDOM OF VOWS 131 



vow which the man in this psalm took upon 
himself. What was the very thing which he * 
said to himself in that moment when he saw 
quite clearly his own mistake and the cause of 
his misery? 

He said: " I will lift up mine eyes. I will 
look upwards. I will take the lofty view of 
things. Whatsoever things are pure, lovely, 
just, comely, if there be any virtue or any 
praise, I shall think on these things.' ' It was 
a great resolution. It is the resolution which 
still separates men. They are the believers in 
God, and only they, who " lift up their eyes." 
It is the work of faith to keep our eyes from 
falling. In this world, as Epictetus said, there 
are two handles to everything, two ways by 
which we may take hold of everything. One 
is right and one is wrong. One, sooner or later, 
means God; the other, sooner or later, means 
the denial of God. 

It is the great act of faith to decide that for 
ourselves we shall always and in all circum- 
stances " lift up our eyes." It is so easy to 
let down our eyes. It is so easy to think in 
a low way about this life of ours. It is so easy, 
for example, — because man is born of the flesh 
and because it may be he has correspondences 
in his physical frame with lower creatures, — 
and it is so easy to accustom our minds to mean 
and base views of human life and its prospects. 



132 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



It is easy also, beholding the evils of the 
world, to lose the eye for life's holier things. 
Having ourselves suffered, it may be at the 
hands of men, or having ourselves succeeded 
for the time being in some unworthy scheme — 
how easy it is to adopt a debasing speech con- 
cerning man! How easy it is in this world to 
let the eyes of our soul droop! How easy to 
lose heart, how easy to blame, or to let go, or 
to laugh the hard unholy laughter of denial! 
Yet that is just what we must not do. For by 
the grace of God a moment comes in every life 
— when — it may be only for a moment — the face 
of God looks in upon us. Well, that is what 
we are to take for the truth: that is what 
we are to believe in, that is what we are 
to test ourselves by for ever and ever. It 
may be only for a moment that our heart 
has felt the tenderness or seen the beautiful 
thing: but we have seen it, we have felt it. 
God has not left Himself without witness in us. 
We have seen the face of God and we are to 
live as seeing Him. At every moment when we 
see our way, we feel our need — it may be even 
our awful need — of God. To undertake a vow 
is to commit ourselves to communion with 
Christ. 



XIII 



THE ONE ABSOLUTE VOW 

"My heart shall not reproach me so long as I live." Job 
xxvii : 6. 

IT is a good thing to hold up before our mind 
some rule or vow which we see at a glance 
will keep us above ourselves if we can only be 
faithful to it. Many of us, I am sure, continue 
to make no progress in our religious life simply 
because we do not deal definitely enough with 
ourselves. We promise to God and to ourselves 
in a general kind of way that we shall love Him 
and obey Him ; and it may be that we are quite 
sincere. But even while we are promising this 
general kind of goodness, we have already made 
up our minds that it will only be a general kind 
of goodness, that we shall in all likelihood re- 
main very much the same as we are at the mo- 
ment, that we shall neglect good things as usual, 
and fall into transgressions from which indeed 
we trust God will deliver us. And so we never 
gain any ringing victory over ourselves, and 
religion is apt to lose itself among the general 
interests of our life. A merely general promise 
of obedience to Christ is almost sure to be un- 

133 



134 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



derstood by ourselves as meaning a slack obedi- 
ence, the mere avoidance of the greater, that is, 
the more public sins. Such a general promise 
has little power to lay hold upon us and rebuke 
us. When we fail at a certain point we can 
excuse ourselves by promising that later on 
we shall make up for it, and so restore the bal- 
ance and not come far short. In this way, we 
never make any progress, never rise above our- 
selves or leave ourselves behind. 

There is a wiser way; and it is a way which 
we practise regularly if we are alive, in our 
secular affairs. We know how the days pass 
and how, unless we take care, we can easily 
not find time to do things, which, nevertheless, 
we know we ought to do. Arrears of these neg- 
lected things begin to accumulate, until the very 
fact that there are so many things left undone 
deadens us and disheartens us so that we add 
to their number still more neglected things. All 
the time we promise ourselves that one day we 
shall attend to them all, but the same force 
which hindered us from dealing with them in 
detail, hinders us from dealing with them in 
the mass. Meanwhile we are unhappy, preoc- 
cupied, not free ; for we are not living honour- 
ably with ourselves. We are like people who 
have put off some trouble, some experience, and 
who, in consequence, feel as much misery, so 



THE ONE ABSOLUTE VOW 135 



long as it is postponed, as they would have 
had for one hour and been done with. 

Now the only way to keep free from thi° 
burden of unfulfilled duties, the only way to 
keep up within ourselves the feeling that we 
are free and masters of our life, is to make 
plain to ourselves some definite thing which 
we shall do and then permit nothing on earth 
to keep us back from the doing of it. This 
recovers for us the sense that, busy as we are 
and beset by the world, we are still the guide 
and master of our own spirit. 

Well, it is some such rule that I would urge 
upon you and myself as the only way of health 
and freedom and happiness in our religious life. 
It is not enough that we come under a general 
and undefined engagement to live the Christian 
life. We must bind ourselves down to some 
specific acts of obedience. 

There is something which we have fallen out 
of the habit of doing, something which we con- 
fess to ourselves, and feel when we are alone 
with God, is incumbent upon us — that, then, is 
a thing which we must pledge ourselves before 
Christ to do. For we have no more right to 
take credit for things which we merely purpose 
doing than we have to take credit for the dreams 
which sway our souls while we are asleep. 
There are things in the life of each one of us 
about which we feel that, as followers of Christ, 



136 AT CLOSE QUAETERS 



we ought to act in a certain way, and that if we 
fail to act in that way, we are there and then not 
Christian people at all. 

Well, we must with firmness make these 
things plain to ourselves, and here and now 
pledge ourselves that we shall attend to them, 
that we shall not give ourselves rest until we 
have dealt with them so thoroughly that our 
souls are quite at peace and we can lift up our 
faces to God without spot. 

The private thing which we see clearly is 
so important that as Christians we stand or fall 
according to our action with regard to it, may 
be anything. It may be something as big as one 
of the Ten Commandments, or it may be some- 
thing very subtle, something which outsiders 
would scarcely understand, though to us it rep- 
resents a real crisis, a call to choose, to act, it 
may even be to crucify our dearest inclination. 
But whatever it is, let us understand that 
just there we are being asked to say which 
side we are on, we are being asked to say what 
it is that we love best of all, and whether in the 
last lonely choice of our soul, we are ready at 
any cost to take the high and holy way. 

It is by our behaviour face to face with those 
hidden issues, it is by our action as we stand 
at one of those crossways, that we fashion or 
re-fashion our souls, and weave that garment 
which we shall wear for ever. 



THE ONE ABSOLUTE VOW 137 



Certainly there is no other way of progress 
in any region of our life except this : to pledge 
ourselves now beyond our present attainment 
and thereafter to give ourselves no rest until we 
have performed our vow. 

I am quite well aware that there are vows 
which no one has a right to take upon himself, 
just as there are vows which no authority has 
any right to impose upon us. For we do not 
know how God is going to deal with us later on. 
Indeed, it may be our duty to break some vow 
which we once upon a time laid upon ourselves. 
We have no right to limit God by taking such 
a vow upon ourselves as would exclude Him 
henceforward from much of our life. To take 
such a vow is really to be dictating to God, and 
to be choosing our own way. 

But the vow which this text expresses is one 
of those vows which we may take for ever and 
ever; because there is no conceivable situation 
into which God will ever lead us where we 
would wish to break away from it. ' ' My heart 
shall not reproach me so long as I live. ' ' That 
is a definite vow, which, if we are Christians, 
we shall wish to take, and it is a vow, which, 
as Christians, we shall never wish to be freed 
from. 

' ' My heart shall never reproach me. ' ' Shall 
we make that our motto henceforward 1 Let us 
think for a moment; for it is a great and search- 



138 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



ing pledge to take. And yet it is a pledge which 
we must take if we mean anything by our pro- 
fession of Christ. " My heart shall never re- 
proach me." Does the vow mean, " I shall 
never in my life do anything wrong, think any- 
thing wrong "1 Yes, it may mean that, and 
even in that sense of it, I ought not to shrink 
from saying that, by the help of God, I shall 
never in my life do anything wrong. One ought 
to be able to say that without any pride, mean- 
ing that, 1 ' Never shall I, of set purpose, do 
anything which at that moment I know to be 
wrong." 

And yet that is not the peculiar note of the 
words: " My heart shall not reproach me so 
long as I live." If, for my heart is full of 
subtlety, if, for I know not the things which 
lie coiled up within me, or the things which lie 
in wait for me in the world, if I should ever 
fall, if I should ever break my oath of integrity 
towards Christ, if I should ever fall or slide 
into a wrong deed or a slack and unaspiring 
state, if ever my heart should speak to me 
about myself, if ever my heart should be 
troubled and grieved about me, about what I 
am doing or what I am gradually becoming, if 
there should ever come to me a clear moment 
when I see myself and am ashamed, then — and 
this is the vow — then, I shall not endure that 
dumb reproach of my heart, then I shall attend 



THE ONE ABSOLUTE VOW 139 



to the private rebuke, I shall be faithful to my 
sense of shame, I shall not put myself off with 
excuses or explanations. I promise that when 
I come to myself I shall arise and go to my 
father and shall say to Him, " Father, I have 
sinned. ' ' 

We may not promise ourselves that never 
again shall we transgress the written law of 
God, or wound the heart of Christ by our be- 
haviour. We may not promise that, for we do 
not know ourselves entirely. But this we may 
promise ; this, and nothing short of it we must 
promise. We may pledge ourselves here and 
now, that we shall never lead a double life ; that 
we shall be loyal to God's rebuke within us ; that 
our heart shall not reproach us, shall not cast 
up things in our teeth, so long as we live ; that 
rather, when in private ways we know that 
Christ is displeased with us, when we are at 
heart displeased with ourselves, when we find 
ourselves becoming hard or careless, turning 
our backs upon holier things, that, in that very 
hour, we shall go away by ourselves and kneel 
down somewhere, and lift up our hearts to our 
Father Who seeth in secret, saying, " Speak, 
Lord; for thy servant heareth," and " Lord, 
have mercy upon me, ' 9 and i ' Lord, Thou know- 
est all things; Thou knowest that I love Thee." 



XIV 



HOW A MAN MAY FALL FROM HIS OWN 
STEDFASTNESS 

"Ye, therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things before, 
beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, 
fall from your own stedfastness." II. Pet. iii: 17. 

THESE words endeavour— and how much 
of the Bible is occupied with the same ! — 
to put us on our guard against certain dangers 
— dangers which arise simply because we are 
what we are, and because the world can never 
be anything else but hostile to the life of faith. 
They tell us — these words do — that it is the 
nature of our soul to drift away from its own 
best moods. That it tires of the strain and is 
ready, unless we are watchful, at any moment 
to betray us. Now, it is no part of true courage 
to despise dangers and to go about the world as 
though there were none. True courage is aware 
of the risks that are to be met and is on guard 
against them. 

Words of this kind, that warn us of the tend- 
ency of our souls to drift out of their own reso- 
luteness, appeal to most men. We all know 
what it is that they are speaking about. We 

140 



FALLING FROM STEDFASTNESS 141 



know that many a good thing has died out of 
these lives of ours. Many a fair morning has 
dawned upon our soul, when we girded our 
loins in the fresh morning air and promised 
ourselves some high and enduring enterprise. 
But how seldom did we maintain through- 
out the day the morning spirit, the morning 
joy I 

Or God visited us in some personal experi- 
ence, in something within our own life which 
we regarded at the time as His very Doing, — 
it may have been in some deliverance from im- 
pending evil; and in that moment when our 
hearts were tender and full of praise to Him, 
we dedicated ourselves, kneeling, to His service, 
saying that we were no longer our own but His 
for He had saved us. But have we paid our 
vows unto the Lord? Or do we pay them now 
with that tumult of joy in which we devoted our- 
selves to Him in the great day of our experi- 
ence? Most people, I say, know about these 
things and are aware in their own case that 
many a high resolution has failed within them, 
many a dream has not come true, many a pro- 
found and sincere decision of the soul has not 
been carried out. Many an aspiration formed 
in some intense pure hour has with the very 
passing of the days grown tame and poor. Like 
a bird sailing with outstretched wings through 
the high blue sky, which folds its wings and 



142 AT CLOSE QUAETEES 



sinks to the earth, so most people know of 
high moments and solitary acts of consecra- 
tion which have lost their first blessedness and 
joy. 

Bnt let us speak of movements of the spirit 
which are less notable and which I believe are 
common, indeed universal. Paul was bold 
enough to say in his day — he had such a con- 
fidence in God — that God had not left Himself 
without witness in any man. He declared, i.e., 
that at some time, perhaps more than once, but 
once at least, God comes near to every human 
soul and speaks to each of us separately. He 
speaks in a way which it is not possible for us 
to mistake. He speaks in such a way that pri- 
vately we confess that it is really He who is 
speaking to us and that we know quite well 
what He means. 

Well, that is still true of us. It would be 
strange if it were not so. We believe in God 
and not in a God who is remote and entirely 
separated from our life. We believe in God, 
the Eternal Spirit of Eedemption who is ever 
seeking to enter into and possess us. That 
being so, it becomes a great act of unbelief to 
suppose that people round about us and every- 
where are not being wrought upon by God, are 
never aware of the Good Spirit troubling them 
and dealing with them in very real ways. On 
the contrary, we must believe that such things 



FALLING FROM STEDFASTNESS 143 



are always happening and happening every- 
where within human souls. That the good God 
is ever lying in wait for men ; that the Eternal 
Christ is ever — as indeed He said — standing at 
men's door, waiting. Waiting until men come 
to the end of themselves, or until life, which is 
in league with God, brings on some crisis and 
lays open their heart. I am quite sure, for I 
know it, that words keep coming from God to 
men ; that all men are aware within themselves 
of checks and warnings and miseries, and on 
the other hand are aware also that Christ is 
making offers to them, showing them oppor- 
tunities for taking a new step, urging them to 
break away from their sins, so that they are 
often just on the point of forsaking their old 
life for a better. I will not believe that men 
are happy without God. I will believe rather 
that often, often, are they — even the most un- 
likely — tired of their own ways and are listen- 
ing. I will believe that high resolutions are 
continually being formed in many souls though 
they are not strong enough to rise to the sur- 
face ; that Christ has a place however shifty and 
obscure in the sober hours of most people. On 
this rests much of our hope of the ultimate 
reign of God, that " Christ is already within 
men,'' however dimly, " except they be repro- 
bate.' > 

The writer of this Epistle is speaking to those 



144 AT CLOSE QUARTEKS 



who have yielded themselves entirely to the pri- 
vate pressure of the Holy Ghost and have set 
out seriously upon the Christian life. It would 
seem that whoever they were, they were beset 
by peculiar and insidious dangers — dangers 
which had made shipwreck of many of their 
companions. And so the writer, who probably 
was their father in Christ, warns them to be on 
the watch lest they also fall away from their 
own stedfastness. 

I wish then to consider with you some ways 
by which men may fall away from their own 
stedfastness, fall away from the first resolute- 
ness and joy of the life of faith. We know some 
ways in which this thing happens. When a 
man, however imperfectly or obscurely, admits 
Christ into his life, he knows that he has ad- 
mitted One who will compel him to change his 
manner of life in many respects. The question 
is whether the man will be willing to do what 
Christ urges him to do. It is not possible for 
any of us to go on very long without coming 
to a point where we must either obey Christ 
or take our own course. It is at such a point 
that we are confirmed or we fall away. At such 
a point we know quite well that it must be one 
thing or the other; and sometimes when one 
becomes aware of this, rather than give up his 
liberty as he calls it, he refuses Christ in some 
headstrong wilful act. 



FALLING FEOM STEDFASTNESS 145 



Once again, many of those who receive the 
Gospel and cast themselves upon Christ, do so 
in an hour of strong- emotion. Our sins have 
been lying heavy upon us and we look to Christ 
out of a sore and troubled heart. Out of the 
depths we cry to Him and He hears us. We 
commit ourselves to Him for pardon and ac- 
ceptance with God. He composes our fears. 
He lifts up our head. 

But time passes. We begin to forget the 
fearful pit and the miry clay out of which He 
delivered us. We may go on to think that 
things were never so bad with us as we im- 
agined. That we were needlessly sensitive, 
needlessly excited. It was in an agony that we 
clung to Christ : and now that the agony is past, 
our hold on Christ may relax. That, my 
brethren, is a danger. But we shall not fall 
under it if we remember — what is true — that 
those old sins from which Christ delivered us 
are still ours for which we have still to answer 
to Almighty God. Christ would have stood by 
us as we answered : but if we will separate our- 
selves from Him, we are in our old misery. It 
is only so long as we are in Christ Jesus, that 
we are free from condemnation. Away from 
Him even by an hair's-breadth and we are out 
once more in the night and amid the old howl- 
ing fears. 

This verse which has been speaking to us 



146 AT CLOSE QUAETEES 



about the danger of falling from grace puts us 
on our guard if we attend to what it says. It 
asks us to beware lest, " being led away . . . 
we fall." — Yes, that is how the sad thing hap- 
pens. We drift before we fall. There are signs 
which are symptoms of what is coming if we 
do not take care. The beginning of a fall is 
usually some private insincerity. The fall is 
the last stage of a secret process. 

Perhaps the most painful incident in the 
New Testament is the denial thrice repeated by 
Peter of the Lord. We have been familiar with 
it from our childhood and that breaks the force 
of the story now. But if we could read the words 
for the first time, they would fill us with con- 
sternation. They would perhaps injure our faith 
even, raising a doubt whether the human heart 
could ever in any circumstances be capable of 
true stedfastness. A man at one moment so 
passionately loyal to Jesus that he drew his 
sword on one who laid hands upon Him, — an 
hour or so afterwards denying with the same 
passion that he had ever known Christ. It is not 
for us to say hard things of that disciple but 
to learn humility and caution from his sudden 
fall. To learn also how it came to pass; for 
when we look carefully into the story, the rea- 
son seems to me to be given us. 

We read there that when Jesus was taken that 
night, Peter took advantage of the darkness to 



FALLING FEOM STEDFASTNESS 147 



slip away from His side. We read that ' ' Peter 
followed Him afar off." That was unwise: it 
was to encourage apostasy. That was not the 
way to face the crisis which he knew was com- 
ing. We know what he ought to have done, 
though we ourselves shall need the full measure 
of the grace of God to enable us to do it in our 
own circumstances. He should have kept close 
by the side of Jesus. He should have com- 
mitted himself in such a way that it would have ; 
been impossible for him to retreat. He should 
have cut off his own line of retreat. He should 
have walked by the side of Jesus to the judg- 
ment hall. It was because he had left His side 
that he could deny Him. 

Well, let us learn wisdom from his fall. We 
do not know what trials of our faith, what 
tests of our loyalty to Jesus Christ are await- 
ing us: but we know that life is full of them, 
and we know the incurable weakness of our 
hearts. Let us be anxious if we find ourselves 
unfaithful to Christ in the least thing, even in 
some obscure issue ; for if it be true that he who 
is faithful in that which is least is faithful in 
that which is greatest, it is also true and for 
our admonition, that he who permits himself 
some private but real disloyalty to Christ with- 
out immediate self-rebuke or repentance is al- 
lowing forces to gather and reside within him 
which will bring about a sheer and it may be an 



148 AT CLOSE QUAETEES 



irreparable fall. A small disloyalty unrepented 
of cuts away the root of our life from Christ. 
It only requires a wind, it only requires the cir- 
cumstance to dash our entire profession to the 
ground. 



XV 



A LIKELY ENOUGH STOEY 

"Demas hath forsaken us, having loved this present world." 
II. Tim. iv : 10. 

THIS is all that we know about Demas. His 
name is mentioned in other two letters of 
S. Paul — in " Colossians " and " Philemon," 
— but only his name. The only thing we know 
about the man is from this verse: and it tells 
us that he fell away. He was one of those who, 
having put their hand to the plough, look 
back. He had been singled out by God, he had 
felt the powers of the world to come : but after 
a short trial of the life of strictness and faith, 
the old things had rushed down upon him and 
the garden had become a wilderness again. He 
was one of those who once upon a time knew 
better, but have now surrendered to this besieg- 
ing world; one of those who after a few brief 
days of seriousness and integrity and openness 
to God, have gone back to those ways, which in 
their better hours they knew to be vain and 
unworthy, — to be indeed " ways of death.' ' 
Such was Demas. A brief light shone over him 
for a moment. He looked at it and his soul was 

149 



150 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



stirred, but lie looked away and lost his star. 
He might in after days say to himself that it 
was no star which had appeared to him, no 
real vision of God, that it was only a meteor 
which had flashed across his sky, dazzling him 
for a moment to leave him the lonelier when it 
was gone. In after days he may have tried to 
persuade himself that it was the light that 
failed; whereas the truth is, it was himself that 
failed, who turned his back and looked away. 
This is indeed all we know about him. In the 
battle to which God called him, as God calls 
each one of us in the midst of this world's pres- 
sure and assault, in that battle Demas gave way 
and went over to the enemy. 

It is all we know about him, I say. When 
one comes to think of it, it is all that is worth 
knowing about any of us. We might think it 
unfair to dismiss a man, as the Apostle does 
here, in one short sentence: — " Demas hath 
forsaken us, having loved this present world.' ' 
But it is really not unfair. All that is worth 
knowing about any of us is: how did we look 
upon our life? What did we make of life? 
What did life make of us! What did we see 
in it? Did we rise? Did we sink? Did we 
drift down the river on the tide of our weak- 
nesses and inclinations, yielding to ourselves 
and to the world; or did we do battle with the 
waves and lay hold on God and on eternal things, 



A LIKELY ENOUGH STORY 151 



while the waters which would have gone over 
our souls rushed by? 

This is all that is worth knowing or worth 
considering about a human soul. It is all that 
God cares to know. Our secret state, our real 
state can always be described as here in a word. 
"We are all of us serving God or mammon, pro- 
testing against our own moral failure or con- 
senting to it. We are looking one way or the 
other. There is the way of Demas and there 
is the other way. 

And now just because we know so little for 
certain about Demas, we are permitted to re- 
construct his story according to our own knowl- 
edge and experience of how men may in this 
world fail towards God and fall away from 
their own stedfastness. 

What led Demas to forsake Paul and to for- 
sake the way of the Gospel? What were his 
feelings afterwards and when he had gone back 
to the world? Was he quite happy? Could he 
be quite happy? Or was he haunted for ever by 
the memory of those severe glad days with 
Paul? And what became of Demas? How did 
it all end? How might it all have ended in 
spite of this ominous verse which tells us of 
his failure? These are among the things which 
we cannot choose but think about. We cannot 
say with certainty what was the whole story of 
Demas or how it ended : we can say what in all 



152 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



likelihood it was, — for we know ourselves; and 
we can say in spite of this verse how it might 
well have ended, — for we know the long-suf- 
fering of God. 

Demas, we are almost sure, was a native of 
Colosse or another of those towns in Asia to 
which Paul had gone preaching the Gospel. As 
he listened to Paul, the voice of Christ went 
home to Demas. He came out boldly on the 
side of Christ and was, it seems, well known in 
certain of the churches. He must have gone up 
to Jerusalem with Paul, and afterwards to 
Rome. It was at Rome he fell. At first Demas 
kept the faith in Rome, for Paul in his earlier 
letters from Rome sends greetings from Demas. 
But later on he gave way. We cannot say how 
it happened : but we know how it may have hap- 
pened, for we know how these things do happen. 

It may be that Demas was of a light and un- 
steady nature, one of those who after a short 
enthusiasm grow weary. Then they begin to 
suspect themselves and end by being ashamed 
of their previous earnestness. He was one of 
those, it may be, easily agitated and aroused, 
whom our Lord recommended to count the cost 
before entering in any very public way upon 
Christian service. There are those — I think 
this is the idea beneath our Lord's words 
— who when they come under the power of God 
ought for some time to test themselves in some 



A LIKELY ENOUGH STORY 153 



humble and obscure obedience. They ought to 
make sure of their own sincerity in some form 
of Christian life or service which though it is 
private will search them and try them. By this 
means they will soon learn whether they have 
begun to build upon sand or upon a rock. 

Or to use another advice of our Lord, they 
ought to sit down upon some lower seat, so 
that when the Master enters He may say, 
" Friend, come up higher." It may well be 
that Demas was never thoroughly tried until 
the moment when he failed. Again, it may be 
that when Demas first heard Paul and yielded 
himself to Christ, he was at the time in some 
sore strait. His own conscience was troubling 
him at the time. He had done certain things 
which, if God should visit them upon his head 
or permit them to take their course, would over- 
whelm him and perhaps bring him open shame. 
In a mood of fear and foreboding he heard 
Paul promise to all men a new life in Christ, 
the end of old entanglements and miseries of 
soul: and with the words a new day dawned 
for Demas. His whole soul, keen with its pri- 
vate miseries, leapt up with gladness to clutch 
at this liberty which was offered him. So long 
as those old fears were real to him, he clung to 
his faith in Christ ; for that delivered him. But 
as time went on, those fears of his became less 
real. It seemed to him as he looked back that 



154 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



lie had been exaggerating his own grounds for 
anxiety, and that in any case those old mis- 
deeds were done long since, and doubtless they 
had lost their power to shame him or to over- 
throw him. It was in an agony that he com- 
mitted himself to Christ, and now that the agony 
had passed, he lost the clinging quality in his 
faith, that is, the very soul of his faith. A 
man who has reached this point will abandon 
Christ on the first opportunity. For if your 
faith is not necessary to you, it is superfluous. 
Where it does not remove a burden, it brings 
a burden: where it is not a source of joy, it 
kills joy. 

We cannot say for certain that it was in 
this way that Demas fell from the faith, losing 
first his keenness and then abandoning the pre- 
tence, losing first the living soul of faith and 
then abandoning the husk, the dead and empty 
thing. We do know that by this way men drift 
out of their early joy in the Lord : they too early 
forget the dreadful pit and the miry clay from 
which He delivered them once upon a time. 
They forget that those old things which used 
to trouble and haunt them have still the power 
to gather around and appall the soul. 

" It is not uncommon to see persons, after a 
period of distress, rush even into greater levity 
and greediness for pleasure than before ; the re- 
action carries them away. A reaction after 



A LIKELY ENOUGH STORY 155 



pain is indeed what everybody should be on his 
guard against. After a fit of low spirits, there 
is a great tendency to an insolent state of mind : 
the excitement of relief is overpowering, and 
the dark hour over, a man loses control of him- 
self in the pleasure of the transition, and gives 
a proud and lawless fancy free range. Nor 
perhaps is there anything which shows more 
the need we have of chastisement than the ex- 
traordinary insolence into which men rush 
when chastisement is over. This is a miserable 
effect of divine visitation. For so, instead of 
gaining one settled habit, namely the resigned 
and patient one, we go on alternating between 
two worlds, one high, the other low, but neither 
of them religious. It is sad when a result fol- 
lows from a divine visitation which that visita- 
tion was specially designed to prevent, and 
when the very effect of chastisement is an out- 
break of pride. " 

But from the fact that it was at Rome that 
Demas fell away, after having stood firm for 
a time, it is natural to suppose that it was 
something in Rome which brought this about. 
Now we know many things which were likely to 
try Demas and any one of them may have been 
too much for him. 

For one thing a change in our circumstances 
always brings with it certain dangers — espe- 
cially to those who are not yet old and confirmed 



156 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



in habits of religion. Probably none of us is 
aware bow much we owe to the ordinary circum- 
stances of our life for keeping us even as faith- 
ful as we are. The friends who know us, those 
whom we are constantly meeting who are better 
than ourselves, and those who look to us as 
being better than they are, the Church with its 
associations for us and its hope and desire con- 
cerning us, — these all help us to remain on 
our own level: they hold us to our word. It 
would be easy, comparatively speaking, for 
Demas to keep his feet in a place where he was 
known, where everybody knew what to expect 
from him and expected that, in a place where 
he had publicly committed himself to a Name 
and to a Cause : but in Rome, he had no longer 
these things to check him and to support him. 
He had not the old stars to steer by, — he had 
not the old retreats and defences and means of 
grace for his soul. And so he wandered from 
his course and made shipwreck of his faith. 
This need not have happened and would not 
if Demas had acted upon the sense of danger 
which we are sure God gave him every hour 
of his life in Rome until he fell. 

There are those who will suppose that Demas 
gave way under the hardships and persecution 
to which he with the others was exposed in 
Rome. He had to suffer so much as a Christian 
that at length in order to escape he denied his 



A LIKELY ENOUGH STORY 157 



Lord. That may be. And yet I think it was 
not that. I dare to say that never once in the 
history of men has the sonl given way under 
external pressure alone. Difficulties by them- 
selves have never discomfited a true man of 
God. Hardships by themselves never hide the 
face of God; they reveal God and wring songs 
from faithful souls. In a recent war we have 
been learning that with modern weapons a place 
may be made impregnable to a frontal or direct 
attack. That was always true concerning the 
citadel of our personality. It can never be over- 
come by outward assault alone; it yields only 
when it has been betrayed. The heart's door 
opens only from within, whether it be God or 
an enemy who knocks. Nothing can really hap- 
pen to the soul until it consents : the universal 
sense of guilt is proof. 

And so, I would not believe that it was the 
hardships to which he found himself exposed 
in Rome that separated Demas from his com- 
panions and destroyed his loyalty to Christ. 
Before that could happen, something else must 
have happened for which Demas alone was re- 
sponsible. He must have trifled with himself 
in some way. He must have looked and lis- 
tened when he ought to have looked away and 
prayed earnestly and consulted Paul. And so 
he may have been tempted to some sin and that 
seemed to cut him off from all the Christian 



158 AT CLOSE QUAETEES 



people that lie knew and from Christ Him- 
self. 

In one or the other of these ways, then, this 
tragedy took place, when the light that was in 
Demas became darkness. Certainly these are 
some of the ways in which we may fall from 
our own stedfastness. Let us be on our guard 
against any one of them to which we seem to be 
peculiarly liable. Let us attend strictly and 
immediately to any sign of a coldness or an in- 
terval coming between us and Christ, between 
us and God, to any difference for the worse 
between what we are to-day and what we have 
been : otherwise that interval may become hard 
and fixed. We may consent to its remaining 
and thus abandon hope for ourselves even in 
God. 

We know nothing further about Demas. Was 
he restless and dissatisfied afterwards! Every 
time he met a Christian in the streets of Eome, 
did he blush and hang his head, or turn up a 
street to avoid a meeting! We do not know. 
Or did he become quite callous, defending his 
unbelief with further sinning, stifling the crying 
of his soul! When he met a Christian in the 
streets of Eome, did he merely jeer and scoff 
and call names! Once more we do not know. 
It may have happened either way. 

And then how did it all end! What became 
of Demas in this world and hereafter! We 



A LIKELY ENOUGH STORY 159 



know none of these things. But we do know 
how it might all have ended; for we know the 
goodness and longsuffering of God — " that the 
wideness of God's mercy is like the wideness 
of the sea." We know how it might all have 
ended even though everybody had been talking 
of Demas' mistake, or sin, or crime, or what- 
ever it was. 

For we have known a woman in the country 
whose son gave her much sorrow until at last 
he ran away from home. But every night when 
all was still, she stood upon the doorstep look- 
ing out into the darkness. And when at length 
she turned wearily and closed the door behind 
her, she would never lock it, not she. She 
always left the door upon the latch, promising 
to herself and to the love of God within her 
mother's heart, that her son would try the door 
that night, that he would steal in and that he 
would see things ready for him, and that in the 
morning when they met, she would speak no 
word of reproach. 

We know how it might have ended with 
Demas, how it might all have ended with every 
one who went wrong or fell out of the way : how 
it may end with any of you or with myself if 
we have gone back or given way or brought 
shame upon ourselves, if we are not so good 
to-day as we were yesterday or at some other 
time which seems golden to us now. We know, 



160 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



I say, how it may yet end, for God will not be 
behind that woman's heart which He Himself 
created — who stood upon the doorstep looking 
out into the darkness, listening for the far-off 
footfall of a son who, except in her love, was 
never worthy of one tear-drop in the ocean of 
her grief. 



XVI 



THE CHUECH OF THE FIRST DAYS THE 
STANDARD FOR ALL TIME 

"And the Lord added to the Church daily such as should be 
saved." Acts ii : 47. 

A LL good things that have come to man have 
JriL come with songs of praise. When Jesus 
was born in Bethlehem, and the new day for 
the human heart first dawned, the air quivered 
with the wings of angels, and across the quiet 
fields there was singing. The same thing has 
happened in various degrees, as often as any 
genuinely new thing has come to the souls of 
men. How beautiful upon the mountains are 
the feet of him that bringeth good tidings! 
How beautiful away on the mountains that 
catch the morning sun — while we who are 
down upon the common highways feel the good 
thing coming and our hearts prepare to greet 
it with a cheer! All times of revival are times 
of singing. Be the revival in the region of 
thought, as in the Renaissance; we have the 
breaking out on all sides of a great sea of 
power. In that day, poetry and art and music 

161 



162 AT CLOSE QUAKTERS 

as we know them were born. Man could not 
choose but sing. 

Or let the revival be a breaking off of some 
old bondage, let it be the first taste of liberty 
by a nation ; once more there is an outburst of 
song, — in the olden days Moses and the chil- 
dren of Israel sang this song unto the Lord: 
" I will sing unto the Lord, for He hath tri- 
umphed gloriously: the horse and his rider 
hath He thrown into the sea " ; and one hundred 
years ago, France sang the Marseillaise. 

" Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
But to be young was very heaven." 

These were so many bridal-songs, — when the 
soul of man committed itself to some new idea, 
some new hope or vision, which man had only 
to see in order to desire it and to recognize it 
as his long-lost, long-expected companion. 

If proof were needed that something had 
taken place just after the crucifixion of Christ, 
something new, something amazing in its utter 
goodness, it would be found in the bright faces, 
the throbbing hearts, the willing hands of the 
old disciples of Jesus : it would be found in the 
praises and hallelujahs of the early Church. 
We cannot read a page that treats of those 
early days without feeling the vibration in the 
air, without feeling the stir, the gladness, the 



CHURCH OF THE FIRST DAYS 163 



sudden generosity, and over all, a most won- 
derful sense of the nearness and actualness of 
the other world, of God, and of Christ, and of 
the Holy Ghost. And if we ask for an ex- 
planation of this excitement and baptism of 
gladness, we must take the word of the glad 
ones themselves: — that but yesterday, so to 
speak, Jesus who had been crucified, dead, and 
buried, had arisen and had appeared to this one 
and to that one; that but yesterday the Holy 
Ghost had come down among them, scattering 
their gloom and planting light and power within 
their souls. 

We lose sight of the disciples at the Cruci- 
fixion and the last look we get of them is of dis- 
appointed and broken men, some sullen, some 
angry almost to blaspheming, all of them evi- 
dently at a loss and miserable. Whereas here 
we meet the same men alert and eager, with 
never a tone of melancholy in their voices, full 
of praise and adoration and with a passion 
for the name of Christ. Something had hap- 
pened in the interval, we say instinctively. And 
we must believe the record — for how slow are 
we all of us to believe the very best! — that 
Christ is dead no more but alive for evermore 
and abroad in the world. 

We feel this gladness, this fulness of life in 
the verses we have read. We know that it was 
not hard for those men and women to be good. 



164 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



Work is light to those who sing at their work, 
and lighter still to those who sing for their 
work's sake. We feel that they are far removed 
from the usual state of many and from the state 
of most at certain times, when the work we have 
set ourselves to do in the name of Christ irks 
us and, but for the shame, we would almost lay 
it down. And yet the same power of God that 
makes all labour light with love is ready at 
hand to clothe us also if we will but seek it 
sincerely — the same well is ready to spring up 
in the deep place of our spirit, if we will but take 
ourselves seriously and not hide from God our 
dry and parched souls. 

It is a beautiful story this in the Acts of 
the first days of the Church in the World. With 
a fine and true instinct those early friends of 
Jesus who had come under the Holy Ghost, 
were not content with singing praises and ut- 
tering their own private thanks. They knew 
that God means us to attach words to the high- 
est music of the soul; that He means us to be 
something and to do something in the hour 
and power of our joy. We may well believe 
that for the first days and until they could feel 
their way more clearly, they did not know how 
to use their high feelings or what tasks to set 
their love to. But they made no mistake. They 
began by being kind. Living already as they 
were in the midst of the heavenly life, feeling 



CHUBCH OF THE FIRST DAYS 165 



nearly all the joy and liberty which we shall feel 
when beyond death we see the glory of God, 
these early worshippers of Christ were set free 
from the care and the bondage of worldly am- 
bitions. These have taught us what freedom 
is — to be content with God and to be anxious 
only to do good. They shared what they had 
with all the rest. And so, they passed some 
days in prayer and mutual kindnesses,— their 
own souls growing stronger in the shelter of the 
love of the others — the gentlest and most hum- 
bling page in the history of the Church — until 
God called them away from Jerusalem, until 
He scattered the little company, until He ap- 
pointed them to preach far off and near and 
never to meet again in such quietness in this 
present world. When that call did come, they 
separated — doubtless not without the sorrow of 
all partings— but also with readiness and joy. 
They knew that only ' 6 the feast but not the 
love was past and gone ' ' : like children who 
pass from home to take up their place and duty 
in the world. 

Our Lord said of men that " except they be 
converted and become as little children, they 
cannot enter the Kingdom of heaven." There 
is a sense in which the same is true of institu- 
tions such as the Church. Unless the Church 
again and again be converted and become as she 
was in her infancy, she shall fall away from 



166 AT CLOSE QUAKTEBS 



her own calling, she shall forget God's high 
intention with her and it may be He will set her 
aside. When we read such a chapter as that 
in the Acts from which we took the text, we 
may feel very keenly the difference between the 
simple gladness and goodness of those first 
days, the oneness of believers in their mem- 
ories and in their hope, (I say we may feel very 
keenly the difference between all that), and our 
own complicated and less vivid Church life. 
Good people within the Church have often felt 
this contrast so painfully, have felt so strongly 
the absence of the primitive joy and friendli- 
ness, the absence of the early simplicity, that 
they have left the Church of their baptism and 
have gathered together in small companies 
hoping to feel in these last days the thrill of 
that great Dawn. And all of us who believe 
that the hope of the world under God lies within 
the Church would welcome to-day as signs of 
an impending Pentecost the return to the simple 
holiness, to the warm feeling for Jesus Christ, 
to the vivid sense of His nearness, which were 
the notes of the Church in her infancy. 

And now let me say two things on this mat- 
ter. — There is a sense in which we have left 
behind us that early simplicity for ever. When 
Jesus said " Except a man be converted and 
become as a little child, he cannot enter into 
the Kingdom of heaven," He did not mean that 



CHUECH OF THE FIEST DAYS 167 



a man had to avoid the stern duties and enter- 
prises of manliness. That he had to remain a 
child. That he had never to engage in all those 
complicated activities which need men and 
which make men. He did not mean that a man 
had to become childish again, refusing the 
rigour and the demand and the conflict of a 
larger and more hazardous life. No: for such 
an idea is contrary to the order of things within 
which God has placed us. What Jesus did 
mean is very plain. It is this. A man, He said, 
must take care not to lose himself in the course 
of his life. He must never forget himself in 
this world, and by reason of the passing pomp 
and show. He must bethink himself now and 
then and look beneath the surface and con- 
sider the end. He must walk softly as becomes 
us who are always moving on the edge of un- 
known things. He must never forget that our 
only security is in God. Therefore he must 
take pains to keep his heart simple, never to 
lose sight of the real things in the midst of the 
vanities of life; but also to go forward with a 
continual reference of himself and of all his 
circumstances to God. He must behave himself 
as one who does not know what a day or an 
hour may bring forth, and who knows that a day 
certainly is coming — and he should always be 
prepared for it — when everything will appear 
very differently from now. This, is to have 



168 AT CLOSE QUAETEES 



the habit and behaviour of a child. God meant 
us all to become men and women and to make 
the most of ourselves. He meant us to use 
our talents to the full, — to play a strong, de- 
cisive part in the world; but all the while to 
keep a Holy of Holies within our soul, a place 
where in secret we are humble and reverent and 
true, a place where we remind ourselves of 
our real circumstances beneath the surface, — a 
place where we hear the voice of life's earnest- 
ness and its mystery, and where, like children 
half -afraid, again and again and most of all 
when darkness comes, we assure ourselves of 
God. These are the children of God who walk 
through life — aware of the difficulty and of the 
darkness and of the snare; but who each day 
take hold of themselves and of God. 

Now, for the same reason it was not intended 
that the Church of Christ should remain for 
ever in her primitive state. For it is in the 
nature of a seed to grow — to attack and to ab- 
sorb and to transform its surroundings, and 
thus to become all that lay within it to become. 
To become a tree whose roots pierce deeper 
and deeper into nature, whose branches spread 
upwards and outwards to the sun and sky. It 
is in the nature of all spirit to take a body and 
form to itself a body which at once defends the 
spirit from assault and helps the spirit to real- 
ize itself. Those who cry out for the Church 



CHURCH OF THE FIRST DAYS 169 



to return to her earliest form, with no more of 
doctrine or of defence or of government, are 
asking for something which cannot in the na- 
ture of things return. 

And yet, just as in the case of an individual, 
though the man cannot become a child again, he 
may preserve, through all the business and en- 
tanglement of his life, the bearing of a child — 
the sense of danger, the wish for guidance and 
reassuring : so the Church though she can never 
return to her first pattern, just as she can never 
return to her first small numbers, may yet show 
forth all the primitive graces, simplicity of 
faith and behaviour, generosity, self-sacrifice 
amongst her members, and withal a vivid con- 
tact with the Saviour and with the powers of 
the world to come. 

It is good to remind ourselves of the great 
end for which she exists, the great end which 
if she misses, all other success is vain. — It is 
true that the tree cannot go back into the seed 
again : but it is true also that all the energy and 
life of a tree are engaged in producing count- 
less seeds — seeds of the same kind as the one 
from which the tree came. So though the 
Church cannot go back to her primitive form, 
she exists to produce men and women of the 
type and quality of those early days. It is 
good to remember that. It is always true in 
regard both to the individual Christian and to 



170 AT CLOSE QUAETEES 



the organized Church, " that in returning we 
are saved." — It is good, we know, for even the 
most mature Christian to get away down be- 
neath the doctrines which he holds, away beneath 
all his religious habits and exercises, and to 
judge himself, his personal temper of mind and 
behaviour, by comparison with the simple, kind, 
believing ones who lived by the impulse of 
Pentecost. It is good, we know, for a man to 
ask himself whether, in the midst of all his en- 
gagements, he is still a sincere transparent 
man; one who himself hopes to be forgiven of 
God, who therefore bears no malice and is anx- 
ious to do good. 

And it is good for a Church and for those 
Churches in particular which claim to stand in 
the peculiar favour of God and to have a pe- 
culiar unction, as if God had respect to persons 
— it is good for a Church and for ourselves to 
be sure that we aim through all our ordinances 
at becoming simple and devout worshippers, — 
men and women who feel the seriousness of 
our life, who bring with them to the house of 
prayer and who find there the peace of God, for- 
giveness and healing and joy within their 
souls. 

We read that in those early days — those days 
which set before us still the work we have to 
do and the promise of the power of the Holy 
Ghost — we read that the Lord added daily to 



CHURCH OF THE FIBST DAYS 171 

the Church as many as were saved. Or as we 
should put it, — added as many as were being 
saved. — The true Church of the Spirit will al- 
ways welcome these — " such as are being 
saved.' ' Who were they then? Who are they 
now? Who are they that should in every age 
enter the house of the Lord with gladness and 
anticipation? ' 6 Such as are being saved 
who are they? 

All who feel that belief in Jesus Christ — as 
the word and gift of God to our human race — 
solves their own private problems for them, 
and gives them rest, — all whose consciences are 
darkened and in pain by reason of their sins, — 
all who are in earnest, it may be even in despair 
to escape from the awful sense of moral failure 
and insecurity, — all who wish to be better men 
and better women, to leave unworthy things 
behind them for ever and henceforth to be pure, 
or it may be, kind : all who are willing that from 
this day God shall lead them; and the Holy 
Spirit and the Face of Jesus shall instruct 
them ; all who have decided to be done with self- 
seeking and henceforth to live unto God : — these 
form the true Church of God in the world. 

To make under God such souls as these, to 
welcome such, and ourselves to be ever seeking 
and finding the higher and more beautiful 
things, — these are the notes of the Church on 
which God's favour rests. 



XVII 



NOT PEACE, BUT A SWORD 

"Think not that I came to send peace on the earth: I came not 
to send peace, but a sword." S. Matt, x: 34. 

THESE are words which we are always be- 
ing tempted to forget. This is a point 
of view which is always in danger of passing 
out of our minds. It is the very law of our 
nature that we turn away whenever we can 
from any course of action or from any way of 
considering life which brings us discomfort. 
We are as ready to slip away from any point 
of view which reproves us as we are to avoid 
any circumstance which gives us pain. That is 
our natural behaviour: that is what we do in 
obedience to the merely physical side of our na- 
ture. But for that very reason good and seri- 
ous people, people who have no wish to become 
lower in the quality of their life, will not resent 
it that there should be continually brought be- 
fore them those higher, severer aspects of life 
which they know they are apt to neglect. Far 
from resenting it, they will rather insist that 
they shall not be permitted to forget the deeper 
and remoter bearings of one thing upon an- 

172 



NOT PEACE, BUT A SWORD 173 



other. They will ask from time to time to know- 
how the life which they are living from day to 
day, — a life which is always in danger of falling 
out of commnnion with the profound current of 
God's higher purposes, — how that life fits in 
with the wider order, how it finds itself and how 
it is likely at the last to find itself when brought 
to the test of the will of God as that will has 
been disclosed to us in Jesus Christ. 

There may be intervals of time in which peo- 
ple appear to be satisfied with a life which seems 
to make no serious demand upon them. But 
these are only intervals of time, from which 
the soul in man rises again invincibly, and the 
longer such an interval lasts, the more pas- 
sionate is the reaction which comes when the 
soul, realizing in a flash its own futility and the 
wretched ambitions by which it was supporting 
itself, rises in a kind of panic and demands 
some task, some way of sacrifice, some chance 
to shed its own blood, — if it is not too late to 
get back into the ranks of God's children. 

We hear from time to time proposals for 
making religion popular, for making the Chris- 
tian religion popular. It is a horrid idea, and, 
as the words are used most frequently, they 
really make a contradiction in terms. You 
might as well speak of making crucifixion pop- 
ular : for Christianity is crucifixion. Christian- 
ity is that total view of life, it is that systematic 



174 AT CLOSE QUAKTEKS 



type of life, which asks a man, for the sake of 
the health and soundness of his spirit, to let 
go everything ; if need be, to withstand his ap- 
petites, to harness his passions, to beat down 
his prejudices, to abandon his sins, to renounce 
his pride, to forgive wrongs done to himself, 
to obey the ten commandments down to a depth 
of subtlety which makes even saints tremble, 
to buffet his body for the welfare of his soul. 
That is Christianity in part: and it can never 
be made popular. Popular Christianity — in the 
sense familiarly given — is an impossible con- 
junction of words. To speak of making Chris- 
tianity popular is as if one should speak of 
making martyrdom popular. For Christians 
are people who for the love of Christ are ready 
to become martyrs again whenever the" world 
likes to put them to the test. 

Now, among all the plans and subterfuges by 
which it is sought to popularize Christianity, 
to attract the masses and so forth, there is one 
which I have not seen anywhere recommended. 
And this is all the more strange, when, as I 
sincerely hold, it is the only way by which the 
thing will ever be done. I mean, by making 
Christianity a harder, not an easier, thing; by 
asking more, not less ; by laying the accent alto- 
gether upon the duty of faith, by asking people 
to join together in the life of sacrifice. 



NOT PEACE, BUT A SWOKD 175 



There have been times in the history of man- 
kind since Christ came amongst us, when the 
love of Him has been a popular passion, when 
a whole land has broken out into song; but it 
has always been a battle-song. The one feature 
common to all those times when Christianity 
was popular is, that in all those times Chris- 
tianity was hard. Christianity has always been 
popular when Christianity meant that you 
might be put to death for your faith on the 
morrow. Christianity was really a popular re- 
ligion when Marcus Aurelius was putting 
Christians to death by the thousand. Christian- 
ity was a popular religion in the sixteenth cen- 
tury on the Continent when the good people of 
Holland were ready at any moment to let in the 
North Sea and be drowned to the Glory of God 
rather than betray the faith. Christianity was 
the popular religion of Scotland when the dra- 
goons were harrying our fathers on the uplands 
of Lanarkshire. The only thing that has ever 
stirred men has been the call to suffering. The 
only thing that has made Christianity a mass 
movement with songs and streaming banners 
has been the hope of death. When the Church 
has not known where to lay her head, she has 
rallied the world. When she has been at war, 
she has been at home. When she has been 
fighting, she has found her hymns and psalms. 
Whereas when she has made a truce with the 



176 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



world, in that day she has begun to be for- 
saken, first by God and later on even by men. 

Psychologists tell ns that there are only two 
attitudes in which one can pray, — either kneel- 
ing or standing: that you cannot pray so long 
as you are sitting, because in order to pray 
there must be in your posture an element of 
difficulty and strain. I do not know whether 
that is absolutely and exclusively true of the 
individual. But it is true as a principle: that 
it is only in times of stress and tension that 
the soul of the individual or the soul of the com- 
munity can thrill to the touch and sense of God. 
There is no doubt at all that it was along the 
line of that insight that our Lord forecast His 
own career and destiny in the world. 

He knew that He had introduced into the 
world a principle, an idea, a standard for life, 
which would always be there to invite men who 
were living on any lower plane. It was the 
faith of the Son of God who gave Himself for 
us, that we should never be able to cast off the 
pressure and intercession of His own mighty 
Love and Suffering. That it would be like 
leaven in meal, a principle of ferment and un- 
easiness until it had penetrated every one with 
its own quality : that He was there, that He was 
a fact, and the world would never and could 
never quite disregard Him or disregard Him at 
all. 



NOT PEACE, BUT A SWOKD 177 



" Think not that I came to send peace on the 
earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." 
The words do not mean that it was the intention 
of Christ to raise trouble in the lives of men 
or of nations. Such a spirit is wholly opposed 
to that impression of meekness and patience 
with which Christ affects us as we read the Gos- 
pels. What the words do mean is that Christ 
foresaw that the effect and consequence of His 
coming into the world would be to introduce 
into the very constitution of men a new and 
active principle which, if it were not yielded to 
and welcomed, would find a way of entrance 
and would there and then begin to set up a life 
of its own that would shake and overthrow 
every established order. It was our Lord Who 
taught us that the world cannot kill the spirit 
which for its own reasons is ready to die. That 
such a spirit lives, dies, and then goes to work 
in the world. And so He likened His Kingdom 
and influence to a grain, say of corn, which to 
begin with " abideth alone," that is to say, is 
separated from its surroundings, is not in liv- 
ing communion with the earth and with the 
mysterious tide of life which flows through all 
things. But, our Lord went on to say, if this 
grain of corn be put in the earth and die ; if it 
yield itself up to the forces of the earth, then, it 
begins a new career which need not close until 
" the valleys are thick with corn and laugh and 



178 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



sing." That seed of grain in allowing itself to 
be crucified, dead, and buried, has now set up 
correspondences with the very life of things. 

As the shadow of death descended upon our 
blessed Lord this was His faith, His insight, 
His forecast of His own unending future and 
prestige. He could never die ; and this, because 
He was ready to die in love. He knew that the 
grave could not cover Him. He knew that He 
could not be holden of death. He knew that He 
would ' ' come again. ' 7 He knew that in giving 
Himself freely — without passion, without any 
heat of anger, — but in deliberate and considered 
love for man — He knew that He would ascend to 
the right hand of God the Father and become 
the judge of the living and the dead. He knew, 
in short, that wherever the great fact of Christ 
and of the whole Christ should become known 
that there and then there would begin to work 
in the soul of the man or in the soul of the 
age or nation a spirit which would gnaw and 
sap and undermine, which would disturb and 
provoke, which would hurry an entire set of 
things to decay in the interests of another entire 
set of things which would thereafter become 
the main life of that man or age or nation. 

It was with no vainglory, with no love of 
worldly fame that our Lord laid upon His fol- 
lowers, upon those who however imperfectly 
had perceived and had embraced His spirit, one 



NOT PEACE, BUT A SWORD 179 



service towards Him and one duty — viz., to let 
the whole world know that He, Christ, had 
come; that He had lived as He had lived and 
spoken as He had spoken; and died as He had 
died and risen again as He had risen again 
indeed. 

Our Lord bade His followers not to worry 
and dishearten themselves as to whether or 
not their work would fail. He assured them 
that it would not fail because it could not. fail. 
He told them that it was no part of their busi- 
ness to know the times and the seasons. That 
their one business was to plant the seed every- 
where and to move on, having set up however 
dimly in men's hearts the sense of a life higher 
than their own which would judge their own, 
which would become a sword of the spirit within 
them. Our Lord even forbade His disciples to 
stay too long with reluctant people: for in 
wasting time over people who will not listen, 
they were depriving other people who were dy- 
ing for want of their good news. 

And it all happened as our Lord had foreseen 
and as it will always happen on to the end of 
time. Jesus died. He was buried. A great stone 
was rolled over the entrance to His tomb. The 
world supposed that that was the end of Him. 

It was the beginning. The stone was rolled 
away; — and Peter and Paul and the early 
Church; Stephen in Jerusalem, later on, Blan- 



180 AT CLOSE QUAETEES 



dina and Perpetua in the arena at Eome; the 
new health and moral soundness which began 
to rise from the lowliest people in the world, 
the new consideration of the elementary func- 
tions of life — marriage, birth, death, — the glori- 
ous company of Apostles, the noble army of 
Martyrs, all attest that wherever the fact of 
Christ comes home to the yearning heart of 
man, there and then, there is let loose a holy 
power, an overcoming joy and patience, a new 
energy for life, for sacrifice : which means only 
one thing, the thing namely which Christ fore- 
saw and hailed for His own comfort even in 
death, that God is with Him, that He will never 
die, that He will to all eternity be the conscience 
of the race, provoking an unrest which shall 
never be honourably soothed except under the 
discipline and the peace of His own holy way. 



XVIII 



THE TRUE WAY NAEROW RATHER 
THAN DIFFICULT 

"Strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life: 
and there be few that find it." S. Matt, vii: 14. 

THESE words were spoken by our Lord at 
the beginning of His public ministry. At 
a time when an ordinary man appearing for the 
first time before his fellows and wishing to at- 
tract them to himself would have spoken pleas- 
antly, Jesus spoke only plainly and severely. 
Another might have presented only the kindly 
side of his message. Then after his hearers 
had been attracted to his side and had publicly 
pledged themselves as his disciples, he might 
have shown them how serious the step was 
which they had taken and what sacrifices it 
would involve. By such means — it is permis- 
sible to suppose — our Lord might have won an 
easy victory from the very beginning. And 
though the majority of those who had thus hur- 
riedly and thoughtlessly come to Him would 
have forsaken Him at the first approach of dif- 
ficulty or hardship, yet many of them would 
have held by Him had it only been from self- 

181 



182 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



respect. For to take any step publicly helps 
to bind us to our choice. When the three years 
of His ministry had closed and He was nailed 
to the Cross, our Lord by this means might 
have had as many followers as He actually did 
have when He came to die ; and in addition He 
would have been spared many of the earlier 
troubles. As it was, He chose a way which 
brought Him as His portion, poverty and fall- 
ing away of friends and in the end the lowest 
form of death. 

Our Lord then — and let us dwell upon this: 
it is almost the only thing I wish to lay to 
heart just now — (our Lord) made no effort to 
keep back the truth that to follow Him and to 
be one of His in this world might bring the very 
extreme of pain and hardship; that it intro- 
duced into a man's life a spirit which tested 
and tried him to the very marrow of his bones. 
Almost His first announcement to the world 
was: — " Strait is the gate and narrow is the 
way which leadeth unto life, and few there be 
that find it." 

Ever throughout His ministry He returned 
to this same note; as if He were afraid that 
people might deceive themselves, forgetting that 
without holiness no man can see the Lord. If 
a man would follow Me, He said, at one time, 
he must deny himself. He must feel the whole 
force of the world's attraction, he must feel 



WAY NARROW, NOT DIFFICULT 183 



the throb and snare of his own riotous nature, 
and yet he must fling back that fierce assault 
and stand up, it may be breathless, but having 
won the victory. 

To a very emotional man, one probably who 
was easily excited and apt to say things hastily, 
He answered — " The foxes have holes and the 
birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man 
hath not where to lay His head." 

To a rich young ruler who wished to become 
His disciple, He said, " Go and sell that thou 
hast and give to the poor. ' ' We read that J esus 
loved that young ruler and fain would have had 
him by His side, but would rather not have 
him at all than have him on a misunderstand- 
ing. 

To His own disciples when they were on the 
point of departing to preach amongst strangers, 
Jesus gave as His last instruction: " Think 
not I am come to send peace on the earth. I 
came not to send peace, but a sword. He that 
loveth father or mother more than Me is not 
worthy of Me; and he that loveth son or 
daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. 
And he that taketh not his cross and followeth 
after Me is not worthy of Me." 

And at another time He said to the disciples : 
' ' In the world ye shall have tribulations : but 
be of good cheer, I have overcome the world, ' ' 
i.e., if you are willing to face the world, the 



184 AT CLOSE QUAETEES 



Spirit of God which is in Me will give you also 
the victory. 

Once when a crowd of people were eager to 
follow Him, but from impulses which, however 
generous, He knew could not withstand the con- 
tradiction of the world, Our Lord counselled 
them to go away home and sit down and count 
the cost — enforcing this with a parable which 
was designed to show them that there was such 
a thing as a false enthusiasm, a spurious and 
superficial earnestness. 

In short, Jesus Christ took pains to warn all 
men that to enter upon the way of life and to 
continue in it was not easy, but hard. 

Of course, whilst that is so, — whilst Jesus 
insisted upon that aspect of the life which He 
looked for in His followers — the quality of se- 
verity and pains — He did not hide the other. 
Whilst He warned all that the good gifts of 
God — and the very Presence of God — would 
never reach any heart until that heart was in a 
certain attitude of fervour and entreaty, — notice 
the frequency of the word " except " in our 
Lord's discourses, — at the same time how He 
welcomed all who were ready, how tenderly He 
took up those who were quite sincere! And 
what things He gave them, what things He 
promised them — until their hearts emptied of 
the old loves and the old ideals were replen- 
ished with heavenly interests! 



WAY NARROW, NOT DIFFICULT 185 

" Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are 
heavy laden, and I will give you Rest. ' ' 

There is no contradiction between such 
gracious words and those stern and unbending 
utterances which we have been quoting. Jesus 
always spoke and still speaks comfortably, 
hopefully, to those who have become aware of 
their need of Him. But until you confess your 
need, until you let go that private something 
which is restraining you, until your heart and 
flesh cry out, the peculiar blessings of Jesus 
cannot reach you. The fact is you are really 
not wanting them yet. 

It is never safe to make general statements 
as to the spirit of any age, or as to the spirit 
of our own age. But it is fair enough to say 
that there is not amongst men or in the Church 
that sense of the momentousness of our life, 
and of its issues which, we believe, brooded 
about our fathers. There has been lost from 
amongst us the sense of the straitness of the 
gate, the sense that the salvation of his soul 
requires from a man a certain sleepless anxiety 
and carefulness, and that even then all would 
be in vain but for the merits of Christ and the 
longsuffering and mercy of God. 

Many things have contributed to this state of 
mind. 

For one thing, religious ordinances have 
been multiplied and it is an instinct with us 



186 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



to value highly only what is rare. What is 
familiar loses power with those who do not 
think seriously. And then churches having 
once been built, must be supported ; people must 
be encouraged and pleaded with to attend. The 
consequence is inevitable: — people begin to feel 
that the Church needs them more than they 
need the Church. This feeling, if encouraged, 
will take the edge from these people's thoughts 
about themselves. 

Once again; in our time as perhaps never be- 
fore in our land, the Fatherhood of God has 
been preached in all its comfort and fulness, 
and with its Promise of Infinite Good for every 
one who will receive it on God's terms. Care- 
less men listen and what reaches them is a 
vague idea that all is well. They take the 
Promise and forget the inexorable terms. 

They hear that God the Father yearns in love 
over every human soul, that Christ is waiting to 
lead sinners home, that everything has been done 
in the heavenly places and as regards God for 
man's return. And it is the truth. But how 
easily it may be misapprehended; how easily 
the words may be wrested by a man to his own 
destruction ! 

And then, once more, we live in these days 
in a whirl of interests and excitements which 
were not present with our fathers. Life has 



WAY NARKOW, NOT DIFFICULT 187 



become for us at once a wider thing and a nar- 
rower thing. We live to-day over a larger sur- 
face, but we are not so aware of the depths. It 
is an age of many distractions and of many in- 
ventions which minister to men's pride and 
bring with them a sense of security which really 
has no foundation at all. We have our tele- 
graphs, our railways, our intercourse with the 
whole world: and all this leads people who 
do not weigh their own conclusions to suppose 
that things are different, easier, less solemn 
than they were. But the fact is that nothing 
fundamental, nothing that is really of impor- 
tance to us in the hidden and momentous region 
of our life — nothing has been changed at all. 
In the midst of all the noise and distraction and 
intricateness of our life in the world just now, 
the old things, the real things, are just what they 
always were. Just as when you leave the glare 
and hurry of a city at night, you come to the 
country with its quietness and its stars. 

Therefore we must take care lest all these 
things should deceive us. Every man has still 
to bear his own burden, and though our ways 
of living to-day make it somewhat hard for us 
to feel it, we are each of us alone, apart, living 
our life and dying our death in an inviolable 
solitude. However complex and confusing our 
human life may seem to be when we look only 



188 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



on the surface of things, it is still very simple 
and very solemn when we consider what we are 
beneath the surface and one by one. 

And Jesus Christ speaks not to us in the mass 
but to us one by one, and as we are in private. 
He speaks within the deep and withdrawn 
places of our spirit. He bids men consider 
seriously those fears and hopes, those mis- 
givings and troubles of the mind which arise 
within us all when we think of ourselves — what 
we have been; and of God and of all that is 
lying in wait for us. 

This is the straitness of the gate, this is 
the narrowness of the way, that until we rid 
ourselves of all carelessness and feel our life 
in its deep relationships, until we 4 1 see G-od and 
are troubled,' ' we are not ready to welcome 
Christ as a Revelation and a Power. 

" Thou and God exist — 
So think! for certain: think the mass mankind 
Disparts — disperses — leaves thyself alone! 
Ask thy lone soul what laws are plain to thee — 
Thee, and no other — stand or fall by them! 
That is the part for thee." 

This habit of private seriousness, of exact 
conscientiousness is the strait gate and narrow 
way which leadeth unto life. It is on such a 



WAY NARROW, NOT DIFFICULT 189 

way that a man becomes aware at once of the 
Infinite demand which God makes and of his 
own poor and unsteady power to meet it. And 
that is the point in the journey where we see 
Christ. 



XIX 



LIFE, IN ITS LONG RUN, THE JUSTIFI- 
CATION OF GOD'S WAYS 

"Now I would have you know, brethren, that the things which 
happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the progress of the 
Gospel." Philippians i: 12. 

IF there is one thing above all others which 
the New Testament declares by word and 
example, it is that happiness, joy, spirit, are 
not dependent upon outward conditions; that 
the basis of personal power is to be found not 
on the surface of things but in some secret 
place, near the centre where it would be very 
lonely were it not for God. 

Like every other really profound truth, this 
is no discovery of Christianity. The really 
great truths about life are few and the human 
heart has known them from the beginning: they 
form together, it may be, that wisdom from 
above with which God sent us out upon our 
journey at the first. Here also Christ came not 
to destroy, but to fulfil ; not to reduce the force 
of any lesson which man through his long jour- 
ney had learned, but to corroborate such les- 
sons, to give them a new point and clothe them 
with the glory of a great day that is coming. 

190 



LIFE JUSTIFIES GOD'S WAYS 191 



In the passage before us, we have another 
illustration of the superiority of the spirit in 
man when he is on happy terms with his true 
source in God. It is a man in prison who writes 
these happy words, in which there is no anger, 
no bitterness, but the most beautiful reconcilia- 
tion. He tells us a few verses back, that it gave 
him the greatest happiness when in prison and 
when as we know the shadow of a cruel death 
hung over him, to sit down and think of the 
happy days which he had had with these old 
friends, days now gone by, perhaps for ever 
gone by. Now that is a thing not to be ex- 
plained except by some high and private reason. 
The great poet of our era, himself a man 
steeped in Christian philosophy, uttered the ex- 
perience of us all, when he wrote, " a sorrow's 
crown of sorrow is to remember better things.' ' 
The fact is, memory will gladden us or will sad- 
den us according to the state of our own heart 
at the moment of remembering. We see things 
through our hearts. The sunshine will seem 
to be only an added cruelty to one whose spirit 
is wounded. The man who could write as this 
man writes in this man's circumstances must 
have had a secret peace which the world did 
not give and which the world could not take 
away. 

It is a thing which we cannot ponder too 
closely, that all the hopeful, happy, triumphant 



192 AT CLOSE QUARTEBS 



things that have ever been said about life have 
been said by suffering souls. It has never been 
from those who had to fight for their life or for 
their faith, that the hard things, the bitter 
things, have been said concerning life. All the 
moral light by which we live has been the 
legacy of hard-pressed and contending souls. 
There have been no cynics amongst the poor. 
There has been no contempt for life amongst 
the poor. There has been no diabolical laugh- 
ter at man, no cold amusement at the common 
hope and pathos, among those who have had to 
eat plain bread and to lay their head upon a 
hard pillow. And these things bear witness to 
the true nature of our soul, and to the terms 
on which by God's appointment a man shall 
find and retain his highest life. We know who 
know anything at all, that a bluntness, a dead- 
ness, an utter falling-away from high and be- 
lieving views of life may come upon us, and 
that this heavy condition is apt to stay with us 
until life, or God by the way of some event, 
brings back a new acuteness and feeling of 
necessity. A man is never so strong, so pure, 
so superior to circumstance, as when some 
shadow — be it cast by evil-fortune or bodily 
fear or by a thrust of moral uneasiness — closes 
him in with Jesus Christ, knowing that there in 
the presence of Christ or nowhere he must find 
his new motive for life. We know that it is 



LIFE JUSTIFIES GOD'S WAYS 193 



just such things as Paul was enduring at this 
time — the loss of friends — the reproaches of 
enemies — the sense of failure and defeat, as 
men of the world might suppose, we know that 
it is such things as these that quicken and for- 
tify all truly faithful souls. Our danger in this 
world — at least this is true for many of us — 
arises not from the hardness of our lot but from 
its ease and smoothness. Man is at his best 
when he is rowing against the stream. To be 
entirely satisfied in this world is to cut oneself 
off from the compensations in God. It is the 
pilgrim spirit that sees the land that is afar 
off. 

We know from evidence elsewhere that S. 
Paul had a love for the Philippians above the 
love which he had for any of his other Churches : 
it was from the Philippian Church alone that 
he consented to receive money for his support. 
Now, it is an evidence of true love, that it 
wishes to spare the loved ones any wound ; and 
so the Apostle, like the brave man that he was, 
is assuring himself and is trying to assure them 
that the things that have happened to him have 
not been bad things but good things, for they 
have done him good, and they have done good 
to others, and he is sure that the longer he 
lives, the more he will thank God for those very 
things which they and he might have deplored. 
" The things which happened unto me," he 



194 AT CLOSE QUAETEES 



says, " have fallen out rather unto the prog- 
ress of the Gospel " and that in three 
ways : — 

1. In the first place, 66 My bonds became 
manifest in Christ throughout the whole pre- 
torian band and to all the rest," v. 13. S. Paul 
was sure that there in that rough camp, he 
was, by his patience as well as by his words, 
recommending the Gospel which he preached. 
He was revealing to those men, who daily came 
in contact with him, a spirit deeper than their 
own pagan bravery. His gentleness, his silence 
shone like a gleam of Christ Himself upon the 
hearts of those heathen men. He was sure that 
here and there one among them would pause 
and wonder as to what might be the source of 
his peace. There were stoics at Rome in those 
days — men of a rigorous and austere morality, 
who knew how to stand unmoved in their days 
of disaster; but they never were joyful, they 
never were thankful for such days. They were 
only resigned. The best of them were sad. 
But what would arrest the minds of those sol- 
diers, what S. Paul tells us did arrest them, 
was that he was lying in bonds — not for a crime, 
and not for sedition — but for the sake of some 
loyalty and honour towards God which they 
could admire, even though they could not com- 
prehend it. A proof that Christ had come, 
was, — that S. Paul was there. And, therefore, 



LIFE JUSTIFIES GOD'S WAYS 195 



he could say: "My bonds are manifest in 
Christ." 

There are two ways in which any of us may 
exert influence: consciously and unconsciously. 
We may set out with the very object of influ- 
encing another. We may speak to him ; we may 
associate with him; we may take advantage of 
opportunities that offer, to advise him or per- 
suade him. But there is another way — the in- 
fluence unknown to us of our life, of our habit- 
ual and unpremeditated bearing, and this is by 
far the more powerful of the two. Many see 
us who do not hear us. Many know us whom 
we do not know. Many observe us whom we 
do not observe. Each one of us is already and 
is always bearing witness to something; each 
of us, by our life, is recommending to other 
people, and is supporting, a particular concep- 
tion of what this life of ours means. Each one 
is helping to make the moral atmosphere which 
all must breathe. This secret, personal influ- 
ence is inevitable, and we cannot really restrain 
it or alter it by any number of mere acts of 
prudence. 

Now, there is comfort in this for many. We 
cannot all perform, but we may all endure. 
Here is a service of Christ wherein all may 
enrol. We may endure hardness as His good 
soldiers. We may give God's providences their 
sweetest names. We may be patient when 



196 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



things are contrary, and modest when things 
are prospering with us. We may strive to pre- 
serve at all times the manner and bearing of 
those whom it cost much to redeem. We may 
not be able to do great things for Christ, and 
yet, we may be great in the way we obey and 
endure. We may fill our obscure place without 
complaining. We may suffer and say nothing, 
or, if our hearts would burst unless they spoke, 
we may pour out those hearts to God. When 
we are reviled, we need not revile again; when 
we suffer we may threaten not, but commit our- 
selves to Him that judgeth righteously. Thus 
shall our bonds also become manifest in Christ. 
We may show to the world, that we are not free, 
that we dwell happily within a great loyalty. 

2. In another way, as the Apostle sees, the 
things which had happened to him, had fallen 
out unto the progress of the Gospel. You have 
it in verse 14: " Most of the brethren in the 
Lord, being confident through my bonds, are 
more abundantly bold to speak the word of God 
without fear." Faith is contagious. One helps 
another in the things of the Spirit. Courage 
begets courage. Many a battle has been won 
because at the critical moment a leader ap- 
peared or some one raised a cheer. It would 
appear that there were Christians in Rome who 
were losing heart, but the faithfulness of Paul 
was like the sound of a trumpet in their souls. 



LIFE JUSTIFIES GOD'S WAYS 197 



We who stand committed to Christ are under 
a spiritual obligation to maintain a clear and 
decisive loyalty — not only for our own sakes, 
but for the sake of those whom our steadfast- 
ness will strengthen, and whom our faultiness 
might confuse or discourage. 

There are many people round about us — far 
more probably than we suppose — who in secret 
are not satisfied with the life that they are 
leading, and who, perhaps unknown to them- 
selves, are lying open to the first genuine re- 
ligious influence which they shall encounter. 
It may even be that some of them have quite 
sincerely begun the Christian life. Their 
strength is not yet very firm; their faith has 
not yet become settled ; they have no experience 
of the religious life to draw upon for any 
special moment of danger. For such people — 
people in whose hearts the higher life is just 
beginning to take root — the world to-day is a 
perilous place. Everything seems to invite 
them to relax, to give way, to be done with 
seriousness. For in our day there is a good 
deal of laughter at serious things, and it is 
more dangerous than persecution. Those of 
whom I am speaking may have separated them- 
selves from old companionships, and this lone- 
liness is another element of danger, and hours 
come to them when the Cross seems uninviting 
and they may easily turn their backs upon the 



198 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



light. All through this, they may be looking 
towards us, though we do not suspect it. They 
may be listening to us, hungering for encourage- 
ment, eager for something which shall put their 
own hesitations to flight. It is for such as 
these, the lambs in Christ Jesus, lives that are 
just emerging victoriously from a private bat- 
tle, just coming out on the side of God — it is 
for these above all others that the Church of 
Christ abides in the world, to be a Home in God 
for hesitating souls, where the atmosphere is 
so penetrated with forgiveness, with comfort 
for failure, with an appeal to those who have 
fallen to rise again, that in this atmosphere 
the smoking flax will not be quenched, and a 
reed will not be broken though it has been 
bruised. 

3. There was one thing more which led the 
Apostle to say that the things which had be- 
fallen him had fallen out unto the furtherance 
of the Gospel. You have it in verse 19. " I 
know that this shall turn out for my own sal- 
vation through your supplication and the sup- 
ply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, according to 
my earnest expectation and hope." 

In other words, for this is the heart of that 
saying, the great Apostle also confessed that 
harsh and baffling things may have their place 
in taking us and taking us further into the love 
of God. 



LIFE JUSTIFIES GOD'S WAYS 199 



It sometimes happens that we who know 
ourselves, and who do not wish to deceive our- 
selves, can say quite confidently why a certain 
thing had to befall us which did befall us. We 
sometimes feel in regard to some private dis- 
cipline, even when we are under it, or as we 
look back upon it, that if we were ever to be- 
come what Christ would have us be, that thing 
had to come. It was the last stroke of the 
eagle stirring her nest and driving out her 
young, not in a senseless cruelty but only in 
order that her young may learn that they have 
wings. Just so, things happen to ourselves 
which simply compel us to put our trust in God 
to a depth which otherwise we should never 
have attempted. 

Things on the other hand befall us at times 
about which, with all our desire to see the 
Hand of God, we cannot see the meaning or 
the value. But why concerning these things 
should we be in any ultimate doubt? We have 
still a long journey to go. We are poor judges 
of what we shall come to need. It may be that, 
by means of those very things which we do 
not at present understand, God is preparing us 
for something which we are to pass through 
later on. Why should we not believe that He 
Who knows what is before us, is putting us in 
readiness for it ! Most of us can say in regard to 
the contrary and interrupting things that have 



200 AT CLOSE QUAETEES 



befallen us, " It was good for me that I was 
afflicted." It is not a great venture of faith 
surely to believe that in regard to things in our 
experience, which may be baffling and dark 
to-day, u we shall yet praise Thee, Lord." 



XX 



THE FOOLISHNESS OF PREACHING 

"The foolishness of preaching." I. Cor. i: 21. 

THEEE is no doubt that S. Paul had ene- 
mies in Corinth and that they tried in his 
absence to undo the good work he had done and 
to turn the minds of the people against him. 

A great and original genius as S. Paul was, 
could not be permitted to deliver his message 
without being called upon to suffer. That a 
man shall suffer for the truth which it has been 
given to him to declare, is one of those " of- 
fences which needs must come. ' ' It needs must 
come for the sake of the man himself — causing 
him to examine his own heart and see whether 
it is really for the sake of God and in the name 
of God that he is saying what he is saying. 

And, it must needs come for the sake of 
mankind — to test any new truth before it shall 
take its place among the things that are estab- 
lished, before it shall be received as part of the 
permanent wisdom and illumination of man- 
kind. 

It will always be necessary that a man who 
claims to deliver a message from God shall be 

201 



202 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



subjected to hardships, were it only as a test 
of his claim, and as a way of purifying his 
message from the taint of vanity. Every one 
who will deliver his soul of a message which is 
going to bear upon the thoughts and practice 
of his fellow-men, there and then is claiming 
to speak as an ambassador for God — and the 
sufferings which the world imposes upon such 
a man is the world's way of examining his 
credentials. It is doubtless well that every one 
who claims to declare the mind of God should 
be challenged by his own age: for a man has 
not himself got hold of a genuine truth if he 
is not ready to suffer for it. It may also serve 
to maintain the majesty of truth, that from 
time to time the world pronounce judgment 
of death against one who in the name of God 
lifts up his voice and troubles us. It may have 
been such thoughts that were in the mind of 
Jesus when He said, " It must needs be that 
offences come "; but, He added, " woe to that 
man by whom the offence cometh." 

One thing which was said behind the Apostle's 
back by people in Corinth who did not like him, 
was, to put it in a phrase, that " he was a mere 
preacher." So long as Paul was in their midst, 
it did not occur to his enemies to say that. 
There was, we may believe, such unmistakable 
power about his words that even enemies simply 
could not deny it. They saw men's faces light 



FOOLISHNESS OF PREACHING 203 

up as he spoke to them, as though a light had 
been kindled at the back of their eyes. They 
had to confess that his preaching had that kind 
of influence which lays open great depths in 
the human soul and provokes an immeasurable 
agitation which can only be composed by the 
consecration of ourselves to God. Therefore, 
so long as Paul was present with them, they 
did not attempt to question his authority. But 
when he had gone away, then they began to 
lay waste the fields where all the delicate and 
beautiful things were beginning to grow of 
which he had scattered the seed. 

It was a fine opportunity for wicked work 
of the kind. The Corinthians were only just 
beginning to be saved. They were at that deli- 
cate stage in the religious life when we are just 
beginning to be serious and to let out our hearts 
to God. At such a time and before the truth 
has taken root within us, before it has gath- 
ered round about itself its own experiences, 
before it has a personal history for us, before 
we have a defence for it within ourselves, at 
that time, at the beginning, our faith depends 
a good deal upon the goodness and spiritual 
authority of those who first recommend re- 
ligion to us. Anything said against them or 
anything which we may detect in them as being 
unworthy, has a sad effect upon us when we are 
just beginning the religious life. 



204 AT CLOSE QUAKTERS 



We may feel for the moment as if goodness 
were nowhere to be found in the world, and as 
if we had been deluded into religion. The Co- 
rinthians were at that stage. They had been 
won for Christ (so far as they had been won) 
by the personality of Paul, through his testi- 
mony, through his insight and enthusiasm, 
through his preaching. And here were men, 
also professing to be Christian men, who were 
trying to poison their minds against their 
teacher. They were raising a question within 
men's minds at a stage when even a question is 
disastrous. They tried to make them suspect 
themselves, suspect their own best resolutions. 
They tried to undermine the revelation of God 
which had come to these Corinthian Christians 
through the preaching of Paul. They spoke of 
" the foolishness of preaching.' ' " What is 
it," they asked, " that you are going to trust 
yourselves to? What is it for the sake of 
which you are going to break away from old 
and comfortable habits and from the ways of 
the world? Is it not ridiculous to obey the 
word of a man rather than the force of tradi- 
tion and the custom of society? " And many 
another thing they said, or might have said, to 
show those beginners in the school of Christ at 
Corinth, that it was foolish and weak on their 
part to give way to the enthusiasm of an hour 
that was now past, and at the summons of 



FOOLISHNESS OF PREACHING 205 



a man who was a stranger, a man about whom, 
now that he was gone, there was not anything 
very remarkable. 

The Apostle learned in Philippi of what was 
happening in Corinth. He heard in particular 
of this charge that he was only a preacher, that 
any influence he had won, he had won by his 
preaching. And what was S. Paul's reply 1 
He replied that from a certain standpoint 
preaching is foolishness, but, he added, that 
from another standpoint all the wisdom of the 
world is foolishness, and that things which the 
world counts foolish and weak are apt to turn 
out to have been all along the wisdom and the 
power of God. 

Let us consider then (1) how, from a certain 
standpoint, preaching is foolishness, and (2) 
how, from another standpoint, it is the wisdom 
of God. 

1. The aim of all true preaching is to lead 
people to take God into their lives and to live 
for God, as God has become known to us in 
Jesus Christ. That is the aim, the object. It 
is a formidable undertaking, for it involves the 
overthrow of the world in every heart. And 
this is to be done by " preaching.' ' It seems 
a foolish undertaking, like David's idea of kill- 
ing Goliath with a small pebble. And then, 
when you go into the particulars of preaching, 
analyzing what it is, your sense of its utter un- 



206 AT CLOSE QUAETEES 



fitness to accomplish what it proposes is only 
increased. 

Think, for example, of the method of preach- 
ing. The preacher trusts to some word of his, 
some idea, some sudden question, he trusts 
to that, entering into the life of some one 
who hears him. He trusts that some fugitive 
word will begin to set up a life of its own and 
conduct a mission within the man's life, and 
that the man will never be quite at peace with 
himself until he has acted honourably by that 
word which entered into his soul. Preaching 
goes upon the idea or belief that a true word 
truly spoken may have the power, if it catches 
a man at the right moment, of overthrowing the 
world in his soul, that it may break up the 
tyranny of years, that it may in a moment make 
sin seem hideous, that it may in a moment melt 
and bring down the hardest heart. All preach- 
ing rests upon the idea that a true word truly 
spoken may rend the soul like lightning, or fall 
upon the soul like light. 

Think of this, too, in order to realize how 
very foolish, to judge by mere externals, all 
preaching is. The words of the preacher have 
no authority, except the authority which re- 
sides within them. That is to say, you may 
listen or you may not listen. You may take 
them or leave them. There is no power, except 
such power as is in them, to compel you to 



FOOLISHNESS OF PREACHING 207 



pay heed to them. Christ refused to use the 
power of the sword. The word is spoken and 
you go your way. 

It is true that the preacher's word may be 
supported by the display of learning, by ap- 
peals to history, or by arguments with men on 
their own ground. The preacher's words may 
be supported by all that; but I make bold to 
say they are never really quickened and made 
powerful by such things. Preaching at its best 
does not argue : it merely asserts, declares, re- 
veals. It holds up a light by which you see for 
the first time what all the time was there. 

Finally, on this line, consider that in a sense 
the preacher has no evidence for what he is 
saying except for those who are already per- 
suaded. He appeals to the soul, but there are 
only certain people who are really aware of 
their souls. He assumes that there is a kind of 
hunger for God, for life, for peace, a kind of 
dissatisfaction in all hearts with the mere 
pleasures of the world; he speaks as if every 
one really had a kind of homesickness for a 
beautiful and holy life. Thus he goes on and 
on, like an inspired child, insisting that we are 
all the children of God, that we are all unhappy 
if we are away from God by even a hair's 
breadth, and assuring us with enthusiasm that 
we need not be away from God by even a hair 's 
breadth, for God has sent Christ into the world 



i 



208 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 

to bring us all home to the heart of the Father. 
Such is the preacher's message, such is the 
beautiful point of view from which he speaks : 
but you see how easily people may not feel the 
pressing reality of what he is saying. What 
then? Just this: there are other people, either 
here or elsewhere, who do feel the pressing 
reality and a preacher must not waste his time, 
but must shake the dust off his feet and find 
others who have the hearing ear and the under- 
standing heart. For let every preacher believe 
that somewhere there are hungry hearts wait- 
ing for the bread of life : therefore, he must not 
waste the portion which God has given him to 
distribute. 

So much for the foolishness of preaching : but 
you see it is the same kind of foolishness as one 
is guilty of — no more, no less — who asks his 
fellow-men to pay heed to the things that are 
not seen rather than to the things that are 
seen. The foolishness of preaching is of the 
same kind as the foolishness of believing in 
God. The foolishness of preaching is just the 
foolishness of being good, of being honest, of 
being chaste. It is only the foolishness of pay- 
ing heed to certain obscure scruples in your 
own lonely soul, of being loyal to certain flashes 
of rebuke and of approval in the region of your 
conscience. It is the foolishness, that is to say, 
the moral grandeur, of a man who, rather than 



FOOLISHNESS OF PREACHING 209 



do wrong in a matter in which he could never 
be exposed, would rather become poor and re- 
main poor. The foolishness of preaching is 
just the foolishness of all idealism, of all high 
and holy living. It is the foolishness of being 
strict, of being clean, of being pure when you 
might so easily throw the reins on the neck of 
your galloping steed and spend your spirit in 
some waste of shame. 

2. And now to consider for a moment the 
other side, how this preaching which is such 
foolishness may nevertheless be the wisdom of 
God. 

' ' My words, ' ' said Jesus, ' 1 are spirit and 
life." True words truly spoken (and that is 
preaching) are, in their measure, revelations 
of God. There are words which, if they get 
down to our hearts, have the power to take us 
to pieces. Nations have risen at a word. We 
might say that the whole world this day is liv- 
ing under the dominion of some half-dozen 
words — such words as wife, child, home, or the 
name of the fatherland, or the name of the 
Saviour of the world. 

Of course, all preaching is a work of faith. 
It rests upon the faith that after all and in 
spite of all signs to the contrary, the human 
heart is waiting to hear such words as God, 
and duty and immortality. Preaching rests 
upon the faith that man is God 's prodigal son — 



210 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



His son though prodigal, prodigal though His 
son. Preaching begins with that. It cherishes 
the secret faith that there is something inde- 
structible in a man which will always make him 
liable to respond to one or other of the great 
appeals from God. It may take a great deal — 
a great deal of sorrow — to open his heart to 
God, but we may all be sure that God Who 
knows us one by one will know how to deal 
with us so that the best things will have a 
chance with us. Well, preaching is full of that 
faith. As preachers, we bide our time. We 
see the world gay, excited, preoccupied, having 
little time and no real concern for the things 
of which we have been put in charge. But the 
Church of Christ, the wise mother and nurse 
of the soul, has seen such times ere this, and 
has seen them pass. She has seen her house 
forsaken, and again she has seen her doors 
crowded with anxious faces, the faces of those 
who are afraid lest they be now too late. The 
Church of Christ, if she be indeed the Church 
of Christ, like her Lord, knows what is in man. 
Therefore, she is patient. She waits, abiding 
her time. She sees her children going astray, 
and in a sense she is helpless to restrain them. 
She can only warn them, saying the things 
she has said from the beginning. They may 
hear and come back or they may not hear and 
they may go away as though they had forgotten 



FOOLISHNESS OF PBEACHING 211 



her. Ah, but they cannot forever forget her. 
It is not so easy as some people think to break 
away finally from the God of our fathers. 
There is a sense in which the spiritual world, 
like this earth of ours, might be described as 
a globe: the further you go from a certain 
point, if you hold on your course, the nearer 
you are to coming back to it. The soul of man 
will come back and back to its only home in 
God. 

A child had wandered from her mother's 
door, pursuing one thing and another, not con- 
sidering the passing of the minutes or the dis- 
tance she had gone. But at last she grew tired 
of playing. She looked up. The sun had set; 
a wind was rising; the great trees and rocks 
had assumed a strange solemnity. With a 
swift-beating heart, she turned and fled home- 
ward. Now, tell me, was there anything in the 
world or out of it so sweet as the sight of her 
home there in the near distance and one dear 
to her coming to meet her in the dusk? That 
child is the human soul, doomed to go away 
indeed, but doomed to come back to her mother, 
to her home, to her God. And the foolishness 
of true preaching is that it rests upon that 
beautiful belief in spite of all the confident con- 
tradictions of the world. May God ever keep 
alive on the altar of His Church that sacred 
fire of faith and patience ! 



XXI 



THE FAITH OF GOD 

"Thy walls are continually before me." Isa. xlix : 16. 

THESE words admit us to the very heart 
of God. It is indeed when we consider 
deeply words of this kind that we perceive how 
Jesus Christ must have been in the Godhead 
from all eternity. 6 6 God is love ' ' said S. John, 
after he had seen Christ on Calvary. " Love 
is an agony " — Caritas est passio — an agony 
of yearning and defeat and faith, said Origen 
of Alexandria. But Isaiah had the first word 
and anticipated them all : " Where men see 
only ruins," said he, ' 6 God sees the finished 
walls.' 9 

The words were spoken to the captive Jews 
in Babylon at a momentous stage in their his- 
tory. Cyrus, king of Elam, had come up 
against Babylon with a mighty army and had 
occupied the great city without opposition. 
And so, exactly as the Hebrew prophets had 
pledged God's word that it should be, it had 
come to pass. The pride of Babylon was 
trampled in the dust. Everything happened 
just as the prophets had foreseen. Cyrus, un- 

212 



THE FAITH OF GOD 213 



believer as he was, became the instrument of 
God to set His people free. Cyrus, doubtless 
for his own reasons, and thinking nothing at 
all of how in doing as he did he was furthering 
God's purposes, issued a decree permitting the 
captives of every nation who had been detained 
in Babylon to return to their several countries. 

Nothing, therefore, stood in the way of the 
Jews going back to their native land. The 
gates were open. The way was clear. God 
had " set before them an open door." And 
yet, when all things were ready, they hung back. 
I know of nothing more disheartening to men 
who wish to think greatly of man, than to con- 
sider the miserable number of captive Jews 
who showed any real passion for their ancient 
liberty and standing. As for the great mass 
of these captives, they simply did not want to 
hear anything more about the holy city and 
those great days of which their fathers had told 
them. " I hate luxury,' ' said Goethe, " it de- 
stroys the imagination." Fifty years of life 
in Babylon had carried those people a long way 
from their old moorings. 

Some of them, I suppose, found themselves 
unable to believe that it was now really pos- 
sible for them to go back, to believe that they 
were now really free. Some of them were 
afraid (at least so they professed) of the return 
journey, afraid of the desert with its wild 



214 AT CLOSE QUAETEES 



beasts, with its roving bands of robbers, with 
its hunger and thirst. At least they gave that 
as their reason for staying where they were, 
although we may have our doubts. We know 
very well from what we know about ourselves, 
that whenever we make a great deal of the dif- 
ficulties, it is a sign that our heart is not in the 
business. Those who see lions in the way are 
for the most part people who do not wish to go. 
It is a very common thing for us to use our 
reason not as our guide but as our accomplice. 
For the great majority of these Jews had, we 
may be sure, come to feel quite at home in 
Babylon. They had grown used to its magnifi- 
cence, its tumultuous and picturesque life; 
used also to its unrestraint, to its freer man- 
ners, and to its sins. For such people, the idea 
of going back to the provinces (as we should 
say), back to the little towns and villages with 
their narrow outlook, with their small interests, 
with their slow ways, was simply intolerable. 

Perhaps, my dear friends, the heaviest pen- 
alty which we have to pay for any long-con- 
tinued neglect of some particular form of seri- 
ousness, is that we come to hate all seriousness. 
To put the same thing in other words: if 
we go on living in a trifling way, never taking 
ourselves seriously or looking the whole of this 
life of ours in the face; if we go on day after 
day avoiding all contact with the ultimate 



THE FAITH OF GOD 215 



meaning of things — whether that be to us mean- 
while a voice or a silence ; the real penalty for 
such a way of living is the consequence of it, 
and that is, that we get to like it, we become 
unfit for anything better or different. Perhaps, 
therefore, the most difficult spiritual condition 
for any of us to fall into, is that condition 
which comes with years and years of elaborate 
trifling, of busy superficiality, when we have at 
length lost all taste and desire for anything 
serious and real, all sense of that severity in 
things, that terror even, which, in the case of 
most of us, ought for good reasons to be there 
until it has been dealt with and honorably com- 
posed. 

There were still others of the captive Jews 
who, though the way was clear, did not at first 
set out. When the prophet appealed to them 
to return, they replied in effect : i 1 Eeturn 1 
Eeturn to what? To dust and ashes'? What's 
the use now? Jerusalem is a desolation, a heap 
of dust and ruins! " It was to these that the 
prophet flung back the words which really give 
us God Himself — " Thy walls are continually 
before me! " 

There was something to be said for the view 
taken by these last. There is always a great 
deal to be said for the disheartening view of 
any holy enterprise: only I do not think we 
should say it unless of course to God, in prayer. 



216 AT CLOSE QUAETEES 



The thing that makes faith faith, is that it has 
to stand up to a great deal of difficulty. If faith 
were easy, we could do very well without it. 
So here; the facts were most disheartening. 
Jerusalem lay in ruins. The jackals prowled 
about the deserted streets. For fifty years no 
smoke of sacrifice had risen from the altars. 
No note of joy was there, no sound of children 
playing in the streets. There was, therefore, 
something to be said for the view that it was 
useless now to go back, that it was now too late. 
The facts seemed to be against the prophet. So 
they were. Just as, I repeat, the facts must 
always seem to be against faith and against the 
enterprises of faith. If the facts — the outward 
circumstances, the plain reading of events — 
were always friendly and inviting, there would 
be no need for faith, and no value to the spirit 
of man in being obedient to faith. Why, faith 
is just the protest of something glorious and 
unconquerable in the soul of man against the 
domination of what the world calls facts. Faith 
too has its facts which it asserts are as truly 
there as the facts which strike our mere sense. 
Faith takes its really unassailable stand upon 
the supreme fact — the fact of God! Now that 
is the whole point of this text: it is the whole 
point of the book of Isaiah; it is the point of 
the whole Bible, and of Jesus Christ, and of the 
true Church of God in the world. There is 



THE FAITH OF GOD 217 



an immense gulf between men, it may even be 
a fixed gulf, who knows! — there are those who 
begin with God and there are the others. 

It seemed, I say, to be a fair and sensible 
conclusion which those reluctant Jews drew 
from the situation of things. The facts seemed 
to be that Jerusalem was in ruins and that it 
was useless and unprofitable to return; not to 
speak of the dangers by the way, and of the 
miserable number who in any case would set 
out. Those seemed to be the facts : that seemed 
to be the situation. 

Yes, but people who were reasoning in that 
way were neglecting something. They were 
omitting one glorious fact, which, if they had 
thoroughly embraced it, would have broken up 
the dismal tyranny of the other facts. They 
were neglecting the fact of God. They were 
not giving due weight to that private voice which 
was assailing their indolence in the name of the 
God of their fathers and appealing to them to 
carry on the holy tradition, which, in a sense, 
throbbed in their very blood. That also was a 
fact; that also, wherever it is to-day — and it 
is everywhere — is a fact, demanding that con- 
sideration and reverence which is due to every 
fact. 

In short, those reluctant Jews who hung back 
from an enterprise of faith because of the dif- 
ficulties by the way, those people who said 



218 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



" Jerusalem is now in rains," were forgetting 
that the real situation is not what we see upon 
the surface, but what God sees, and what He in 
holy and prophetic moments reveals to us in 
measure. The real fact about any situation or 
about a human soul is — what lies within it for 
God, what it is worth to God. And this is the 
work of God — to make us believe, to make us 
see things and see ourselves and one another 
as He in His infinite hopefulness sees us all. 
"Where we see ruins, He sees the walls. Where 
we see what appears to the eye, He sees all 
that may be, all that is there for the coming 
out. He sees what lies behind the appearance, 
what slumbers at the depths of the fact. He 
sees the spring in winter; He sees the bud al- 
ready on the bare branch; He hears the music 
which sleeps upon the strings; He sees His 
children, heirs of God, joint-heirs with Christ, 
in such beings as you and me. The whole thing 
is ridiculous ! And yet so it is. if God is. 

" Thy walls are continually before me." 
That is the very heart and being of God. It 
is the insight and passion of love. God be- 
lieves. He does not despair; He waits on 
and on. 

What if God were to become discouraged 
over us, as well He might ? What if He were 
to become impatient of this old world which 
has taken such an infinite time to learn the 



THE FAITH OF GOD 219 



very alphabet of heaven? What if He were 
to follow our example and become tired? 
What if He were to turn His back upon us 
and let us alone? Ah, well: He does not. 
Now that Christ is of us, He will not. He lives 
by faith — yes, by faith in the Son of God Who 
gave Himself for us all. He sees something 
coming. He hears along the corridor of time 
the far-off footfall of something surely com- 
ing. He sees man, the prodigal son, coming 
back and home. He believes that a world 
which has once seen Christ, can never per- 
manently be satisfied with any life which that 
Holy Face condemns. God is love. He is the 
Great Believer. He sees things that are as 
though they were not : and things that are not 
as though they were. " Thy walls are con- 
tinually before me " — that is how God comforts 
Himself. He loves us all for the sake of some- 
thing which He has never seen — for the sake 
of our possibilities. Once only, according to 
the great doctrine of our faith, did God ever see 
the ideal realized, once only did His great hope 
for man find its response. But once is enough 
for Love ; the hint is as good as the whole. For 
the sake of Christ who appeared once in our 
flesh, He bears with all that He must see in us 
and in the world. 

As a mother bears with a wayward child, 
.believing in something which, though she sees 



220 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



no sign of it, she hopes one day to see; as her 
love holds out in after days when it may be the 
years have failed to realize that good which 
she dreamed about her boy; as she still sees 
him in her mother's heart, not him the mistake 
or the shame, not him as he is, but him as he 
might have been, him in the light of her de- 
sire ; as she still protests that her child is some- 
thing more and something better than has ever 
appeared; as she never really gives him up as 
bad, as lost ; or if she gave him up would in that 
hour cease to be his mother according to the 
spirit ; so God, our Father in Heaven, abides us 
all, endures the awful disappointments of time, 
in the hope that some day the sin, the madness, 
will pass out of our blood, and in the train of 
Jesus Christ we shall come home to God. 

Brethren, in the great charity of God you 
and I are not simply what we are in our mere 
performances. We are also what we are in 
our lonely protests — in our tears and agonies 
and cries. We are not merely what we are in 
our feelings about ourselves; still less are we 
altogether what we may have given the world 
cause to consider us. We are really what we are 
to those who love us. We are really what we are 
to that holy and loving God Whose face man 
saw for one tremendous moment in the Christ 
of history. Let us, therefore, go on to believe, 
and let us act as though we did believe, that in 



THE FAITH OF GOD 221 



that same great charity of God, we may through 
Christ's eternal intercession even yet recover 
the lost provinces of our souls, may yet become, 
both now and through the ages, all that God 
saw in us as possible, all that He dreamed of 
us when He decreed us being, and set us our 
task in the world of spirits. 
In conclusion let me say : 

1. We are to imitate the faith of God. We, 
also, are to see " the walls " — God's completed 
purposes — ever before us. Everybody sees the 
ruins. It needs no great qualification to see 
difficulties. It is the mark of God's calling to 
see ' 6 the walls. ' ' We have nothing to do with 
times and seasons or with events; we have only 
to do with duties. 

2. We cannot see ' ' the walls ' ' : let it be enough 
that God sees them, that Christ saw them. 
For ourselves, the proof that the walls are 
coming is that He has given us the instinct to 
build. 

3. This vision is ours when our hearts are 
pure. There is an old legend of the Middle^ 
Ages of a pilgrim who, as he passed through 
dark and silent forests, saw before him a great 
cathedral, even heard the solemn and happy 
music of it. But as often as his own heart be- 
came confused with doubt or lost its beautiful 
balance through the disturbance of some private 
sin, the vision perished, the music ceased, leav- 



222 AT CLOSE QUABTERS 



ing him in the pathless forest, surrounded by 
the ancient darkness and natural despair. So 
the pure in heart see God. But begin to build 
if you would be sure of " the walls." In every 
matter into which God comes, those who merely 
look on see nothing. 

And above everything, let us keep in touch 
with the Master; in communion with that great 
Soul of faith and hope and love ; in communion 
with that atmosphere of miracle and triumph 
which caught into a kind of glory the first 
apostles. For what man once saw, he may 
still see. The power of that vision is still there, 
still somewhere, if we will only seek it with our 
undivided will, with our undistracted confi- 
dence. 



XXII 



THE TENDENCY TO FAINT 

"Wherefore we faint not." II. Cor. iv: 16, R. V. 

THERE is no better way of spending an 
hour over the Bible — especially for those 
who are advanced beyond the very beginnings 
of the Christian life — than simply to look rip, 
with the help of a concordance, the passages 
in which some particular word or phrase oc- 
curs. I know that this may, of course, be done 
very foolishly and unprofitably. For example, 
I have heard of one searching assiduously for 
all the passages in which the word 4 ' neverthe- 
less " occurs, and then copying them out in 
order. Now that may be an excellent enough 
task, and in the course of such an exercise the 
Spirit of God may find many a blessed oppor- 
tunity for enriching or enlightening the mind 
of the student. But, even in that case, the 
blessing will not come from the discovery here 
and there of such an unpromising word as 
" nevertheless/ ' but from the more beautiful 
and more fruitful words which he encountered 
by the way. 
And indeed, life is full of this wonderful 

223 



224: AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



kindness on the part of God. TVe have often set 
out to look for something, and God has taken ad- 
vantage of the fact that we are now looking for 
anything and has shown us far more wonderful 
things than we were thinking about. Again 
and again we are like Saul the son of Kish look- 
ing for his father's asses and rinding a king- 
dom, learning too that though he had stopped 
looking for his asses, even they had not been 
forgotten. 

And so, I can well believe that a simple 
Christian soul searching the Bible even for such 
a word as " nevertheless " may meet God by 
the way. I repeat it is no new thing for us 
to be looking for some little thing which we had 
lost and to find something of greater impor- 
tance which we had lost long before. 

The great thing in this world, whether we 
are reading the Bible at the moment or no, is to 
be on the lookout — on the lookout for God. 
But it is no sign of grace to be foolish, and 
there are better words to search the Scriptures 
for than such a word as ' 1 nevertheless.' ' If 
God is pleased to bless our stupidity, how much 
more is He likely to bless our good sense! 

The exercise which I would recommend to 
Christians, particularly to Christian preachers 
and to all who want to be better Christians than 
they are, is this : I would have you get hold of 
some word or phrase which arrests you as you 



THE TENDENCY TO FAINT 225 



are reading your Bible, arrests you because it 
seems to be so true, so like what you yourself 
have felt, or better still, so like what you your- 
self have never felt, but would like greatly to 
feel : get hold of some word or phrase which you 
understand, either as having experienced it, or 
as not having experienced it, and then get on, 
the track of that word or phrase from your lists 
of parallel passages or from your concordance. 
All kinds of happy results will follow. For 
one thing, you will positively get to like your 
Bible. For another thing, you will get to know 
yourself better, especially if it be a really val- 
uable word, a word of the human heart or of 
the Divine heart, that you are looking for. You 
will feel that you understand everything the 
Bible says about it. You will find yourself get- 
ting to the roots of it, seeing beyond it and 
beneath it, seeing how one thing in the spiritual 
life is related to another thing, one feeling to 
another feeling, one grace to another grace, one 
sin to another sin, until, although you may not 
be aware of it, you also have come to see that, 
as Newman puts it, " there are only two lu- 
minous realities in this world — God and your 
own soul." 

But I have stood on the threshold too long, 
when I might have been proving all these things 
and doing some service to your spirit by giving 
an illustration. 



226 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



In my reading the other morning I came to 
the verse which I have made to serve as a text. 
I read : ' 1 Wherefore we faint not. ' ' I had read 
it hundreds of times before, for the fourth chap- 
ter of Second Corinthians is one of those chap- 
ters which we simply cannot do without. And 
like all the chapters which contain great and pre- 
cious truths, the words of that chapter roll and 
swell like music or like the sea. I had always 
read on and on, but that morning I stopped, ar- 
rested by the word " faint," — " we faint 
not." In a moment I found myself recalling 
other passages in which the Apostle — for it is 
a great word of S. Paul's — uses this very ex- 
pression. I recalled: " Let us not be weary 
in well-doing; for in due season we shall reap 
if we faint not." I recalled: ''Wherefore I 
desire that ye faint not at my tribulations for 
you." Then my mind flew back to that verse 
in the 27th Psalm: " I had fainted, unless I had 
believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the 
land of the living." This suggested some 
words of our Lord's in S. Luke's Gospel, where 
we read that our Saviour spake a parable " to 
this end, that men ought always to pray and 
not to faint." And so on and on, until for 
sheer lack of time I had to desist. 

But even at this stage, the whole subject of 
" fainting " in the cause of God had become 



THE TENDENCY TO FAINT 227 



much clearer to me. Let me say what exactly 
had become clear to me. 

The first thing which you will note as hint- 
ing at a principle or law upon the whole mat- 
ter of fainting or growing tired and unwilling 
in the work of obedience of Christ, is that there 
is a great deal said about it in the New Testa- 
ment. Now, in a way, that is a comforting 
thing to know. We are not the only people, 
the only Christians even, who know what it is 
to be on the point of " fainting.' ' Evidently it 
is an old malady and was familiar even in the 
first days when men were still living who had 
actually seen the face of Jesus. I say it is a 
comforting thing to know that this tendency 
to faint and tire which comes to us now and 
then is not necessarily the sign of some incor- 
rigible badness in us. For probably we are 
tempted to faint for the same reasons that peo- 
ple in the New Testament were tempted. We 
can well understand why they were tempted to 
faint. Here were a few people or a few com- 
panies of people setting themselves to arrest 
and to turn back the ancient evil of the whole 
world. They were like to faint, just as we 
should be like to faint if we were to try to push 
a mountain out of its place. They were like 
to faint because the task seemed to be too big 
for them. And it is for that very reason that 
so many of us are not only tempted to faint, 



228 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



but actually have fainted or have turned our 
back on our calling. 

Another thing which would dispose people in 
the early Church to " faint " would be not sim- 
ply the quantity of the work which lay before 
them, but, so to speak, the quality of it. I mean 
to say, they would be apt to lose heart because 
although they knew that they had the Gospel to 
declare, — something which would bring an inner 
sunshine into everybody's life, the people to 
whom they went seemed to have no interest in 
what they were saying. And so they would be 
apt to become depressed, trying to speak about 
Christ to people who did not want to hear. 
And that too is another reason why many of us 
are not only tempted to faint, but have miser- 
ably given up. 

Such, then, is the first principle or law in the 
matter which comes home to us when we col- 
lect the passages in the New Testament where 
" fainting " is spoken about. We feel that it 
was a common temptation; and though we are 
wise not to excuse ourselves for any sin of our 
own by saying that other people have been 
guilty of the same, still it is a comfort to know 
that if we have fainted, it was not necessarily 
because of any real badness in ourselves but 
because of something in our very circumstances 
as bearers of light in a dark world. 

But there is another reason why we must 



THE TENDENCY TO FAINT 229 



take care not to excuse ourselves for " faint- 
ing ' 9 in the Christian life by quoting examples 
of those who have done no better in the New 
Testament times. It is this, and it leads me to 
the second great law or principle which the pur- 
suit of this word in the New Testament will 
discover to us. You will find that though there 
are a great number of references to ' 4 faint- 
ing," there is no single instance of a good man 
or woman actually fainting, actually succumbing. 
Indeed, it would be literally true to say that the 
word " faint " does not occur in the New 
Testament. What occurs in the New Testa- 
ment is the phrase " not faint.' ' What the 
New Testament speaks of is not how the good 
people " fainted,' ' but how when they might 
well have fainted, how when they were perhaps 
on the point of fainting, they nevertheless kept 
up their heart. In fact the New Testament is 
no authority upon - i how to faint " or " why 
we faint ": it is an authority on ' ' how not to 
faint," and " why we ought not to faint." 

And that is like the Bible everywhere. It 
does not tell us much as to how or why any 
particular evil thing should be here in this 
world. The Bible does not tell us in any final 
or satisfying way how sin, and sins of every 
kind, got into this world. But the Bible does 
tell us how sin and every kind of sin is to be 
got out of the world. The Bible does not, when 



230 AT CLOSE QUABTERS 



all is said, tell us anything which is really final 
or satisfying to a speculative mind about the 
mystery of pain and the presence of such a 
shadow as death in this world. But it tells us 
with great fulness how we may be helped in 
the bearing of suffering, and how we may be 
fortified in the presence of death. So in the 
matter before us, the Bible has little to say as to 
how good men faint in the higher obediences of 
life : it has everything to say as to how they need 
not faint, and why they must not faint. 

Recall for a moment these two principles 
which we have made clear as being in the doc- 
trine of the New Testament with regard to 
fainting: (1) that life is full of a test and has 
always been full of a test upon our spiritual 
endurance: that life brings and will always 
bring that trial of our spirit which disposes us 
to give up the good fight, i.e., to faint; and 
(2) that though this is so, though there will 
always be the liability, the temptation to yield, 
nevertheless there is no need to yield, nay, there 
is every reason and every assistance why we 
should not yield. Bring those two together and 
you have our very position in this world as 
spiritual men. Challenged, opposed, having 
more to do than in our own strength we can 
do — ready to faint, and yet all the time know- 
ing that we are in league with the Source of all 
Power! If I am not wearying you with the 



THE TENDENCY TO FAINT 231 



repetition of the word, I should like to go on 
with this study for a moment or two longer. 

I should like to make clear what the New 
Testament means by what we call " fainting 
what, according to the New Testament, is the 
secret cause of it, what is the fallacy under- 
lying the reasoning which leads on to it, what, 
in short, is the psychological process which, 
unless it be interrupted, leads on inevitably to 
that state of unwillingness and impatience, and 
defeat and sadness and heaviness of heart — all 
of which we mean when we speak of fainting. 

Now, the New Testament, through the spirit- 
ual genius and illumination of the Apostle 
Paul, makes all that plain in a moment. He 
makes it all plain by the word he uses for 
" fainting." Like so many others it is a word 
which he had to make up. For you must re- 
member that Jesus Christ introduced such new 
things into the word, new states of feeling, 
ideas, purposes, and the shadows of all these, 
that there were actually no words even in such 
a subtle language as the Greek which could 
quite do justice to them. In some cases the 
apostles took the best Greek word they could 
lay hands on and they used it for their own 
higher burden of meaning; and, therefore, we 
might say that Jesus Christ came into the 
world, not only to save men but to save words, 
actually to create a clean heart and renew a 



232 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



right spirit within words. Such a word — a 
word which Christ has redeemed — is the word 
" love." But in many cases S. Paul especially 
could say what his heart was breaking to say 
only by making up a word to serve that occa- 
sion. 

Now, it is a great advantage when we come 
across one of those made-up words; for we 
can see into the very soul of S. Paul at the time 
and follow his very idea. The word which the 
Apostle uses for " fainting " is a word of this 
kind. He had to make it up. The Greek lan- 
guage had already a word for swooning or 
drooping or sinking exhausted {uapivGo). But 
S. Paul gives us in his word not only the state 
of feeling which we mean by faintness; but he 
succeeds in telling us at the same time how the 
feeling arises. His word is iynannv, which 
means 6 ' to take the evil out of. ' ' Let us make 
that clear. Take the words in II. Thess. iii :13 : 
" But ye, brethren, be not weary," or " faint," 
1 ' in well-doing. ' 1 His words literally mean : 
" But ye, brethren, when you are doing beauti- 
ful or good things, do not take the evil of them 
into your heart." Now I think that is a great 
insight into the human heart, a great light from 
God upon the workings of our mind. For 
when we " faint " in any good cause, either 
in the solitary business of our own spiritual 
life, or in the duties which Christ lays upon 



THE TENDENCY TO FAINT 233 



us in regard to others, when we " faint," what 
is it that really happens within us? It is just 
what S. Paul says: " we take the evil of it 
into our heart.' 9 We dwell upon the evil of 
the experience, whatever it may be. We select 
the evil of it as though that were the truth of it, 
whereas Grod is the truth of every good thing 
to which we set ourselves. You are doing 
something, let me say, for Christ's sake. 
You meet opposition either within your own 
nature or outside in the world. Well, the dan- 
ger is that you let your mind begin to dwell 
upon the difficulty, upon the evil ; you take that 
in. You allow yourself to fall into thinking of 
the evil as though it were the heart of it all. 
That, says the Apostle, is what we are not to 
do. It is that that tires us. We are not to let 
the difficulties that lie in the way of any spirit- 
ual ambition or task come right into our heart. 
God is to be in our heart; Christ is to be in 
our heart; and however close to us the difficul- 
ties may come we must never allow them to 
come so close to us that Christ cannot get in 
between them and us. 

Why again does any one " faint " in his ef- 
forts to become the holy man Christ would have 
him be? Why does he become sad and de- 
pressed at his own failures and backslidings 
and ready to give up the fight! Once more it 
is because " he takes the evil " into his heart. 



234 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



He sees, as the one thing in God's dealings with 
him, that he has failed or fallen short. He will 
not see the one thing which he ought above 
everything to see, that it is because God is deal- 
ing with him that he is conscious of failures at 
all. It is because God, because the Holy Ghost, 
is making something of him that he has those 
pains of growth. This is what he must take 
into his heart. 

I can quote only three more verses which 
contain the idea of " fainting,' ' and I quote 
them because they give us, I believe, the true 
method of dealing with ourselves when we be- 
come aware that in the service of Christ we are 
growing slack or losing our keenness. It is a 
great thing to know how to deal with ourselves 
when we fall ill. And this faintness is a kind 
of sickness of the soul, in which the patient 
must minister to himself. Here, then, are the 
three verses and three rules for bringing back 
health and vigour to our souls : 

' ' Men ought always to pray, and not to 
faint " (Luke xviii: 1). When you are like to 
faint, when you are on the point of fainting, of 
giving up, don't. When you are on the point 
of sinking down in gloom, lean back rather on 
the Everlasting Arms. When you are like to 
faint, pray instead. 

The second prescription of the Spirit is, 
" As we have received mercy, we faint not " 



THE TENDENCY TO FAINT 235 



(II. Cor. iv : 1) . I do not know what that means 
if it does not mean that when we are tempted 
to faint, tempted to give way, to yield, to re- 
sign, let ns try to remember at that moment 
what we owe to Jesus Christ. " As we have 
received mercy, we faint not." 

The third recommendation of the Spirit is 
this: ' ' Consider him that endured such con- 
tradiction of sinners against Himself, lest ye be 
wearied and faint in your minds " (Heb. 
xii:3). These words take us to the Cross of 
Christ and leave us there — there where surely 
we shall become ashamed of the little the best 
of us have done, the little the best of us have 
suffered. 



XXIII 



THE CUEE OF THE QUESTIONING 
SPIRIT 

"And no man after that durst ask Him any question." S. 
Mark xii ; 34. 

THE tendency to ask questions of a certain 
kind is apt to appear in men and in nations 
when they are past their best : it is a sign that 
nothing very great or heroic is now to be ex- 
pected of them. In earlier days a man, and the 
same is true of an entire people, is ready to 
yield himself freely to the accepted sentiments 
about life and duty and indeed about all things, 
and to go by the proved wisdom of the race. In 
later days, when it may be he has settled down 
to some kind of equilibrium with all his sur- 
roundings, and he conceives it to be his interest 
to sit still, a man is apt to use his intelligence in 
a merely querulous way in order to keep off 
some insistent care. In our youth we have not 
yet corrupted that force for life and action with 
which God endows us all at the beginning. For 
we all of us do set out with the instinct to live. 
We have the feeling that we are fit for all our 
circumstances, and in early days the one use 

236 



CURE OF QUESTIONING SPIRIT 237 



which we make of our reason is to find all kinds 
of ways for the expression of ourselves. We 
think in order to act. It is the charm of child- 
hood and unspoiled youth, that no questions are 
raised : — I mean questions of an ultimate kind. 
Later on, it may be, we are unable to escape the 
malady of thought. Things happen to us which 
throw us back upon ourselves. We see our- 
selves apart from the world and apart from all 
other lives and thus begin to tamper with the 
works. We raise the question " why? " This 
is the condition described once for all by Ham- 
let, — the condition in which ' 6 the native hue of 
resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of 
thought ; and enterprises of great pith and mo- 
ment, with this regard, their currents turn awry, 
and lose the name of action. ' J When this hap- 
pens we have left our childhood behind; and it 
will never come back again, unless by the way of 
an utter faith in what Jesus has said about 
everything. For it is the gift of God in Christ 
to restore to us face to face with life something 
of the unquestioningness of our childhood. 

It may have been that which our Lord had in 
view when He took a little child and put him in 
the midst of the people and said, ' 1 of such is the 
kingdom of heaven. ' ' And surely it is a condi- 
tion of heart and mind for which we should be 
ready to make any sacrifice, — to be able to live 
in this great world with the sobriety of men in- 



238 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



deed but with the unquestioning happiness, the 
unthinking acceptance of life, which is the charm 
of children. 

Now if it had been God's will that we should 
be children and never anything more than chil- 
dren, He would have given us a nature which in 
childhood reached its limit. But by His own 
decree we grow, and it is one sign of our growth 
that we begin to think ; and what is thinking but 
the asking of questions and the discovery of 
answers? In that sense we must all leave be- 
hind us for ever the intellectual peace of our 
childhood. And yet there is something in our 
childhood which we must not leave behind, 
something which we must carry forward into 
life, something which with all our questioning 
must not be corrupted, something which is in 
danger of being corrupted by the spirit of ques- 
tioning more than by any other kind of indul- 
gence. 

There is an interest which, so long as we are 
children, is everything with us, and it is an inter- 
est which no later development of our faculties 
must be permitted to reduce or to damage or to 
destroy. It is the interest of life, it is the in- 
stinct to live. In children it is the gift of nature : 
later on it is the work of faith. In children it is 
a natural happiness : later on it is reconciliation, 
the peace of God, the victory over the question- 
ing spirit. 



CUBE OF QUESTIONING SPIRIT 239 



The bearing of all this will be clear when I lay 
down this rule, that the raising of questions is 
right and good only when our object is to in- 
crease within ourselves the force of life or to 
raise the quality of it. And the converse is true 
and puts us upon our guard, that the putting of 
questions is wrong and bad when our object is to 
justify ourselves or to encourage ourselves in 
holding back from life. We might go further 
and say that any answer to our questioning 
which heightens the power or improves the qual- 
ity of life in us, is finally right and God's word 
to us, however it may stand with regard to the 
wisdom and fashion of our time. And any 
answer to our questioning is wrong and is a 
word from the enemy of our souls, which has 
the effect of depressing our vitality or lowering 
the reach and quality of our Spirit, no matter 
how it falls in with the mood of our day or of 
our class. 

We know very well who have even the least 
practice in examining ourselves, that there are 
two totally different moods and tempers in 
which we raise questions in our own minds about 
life. We may be on the lookout for facilities, 
corroborations, encouragements for the life- 
force within us. Or we may be on the lookout 
for difficulties, for justifications of our moral 
indolence. And it is no small part of a man's 
^ask in our day to keep an eye upon himself in 



240 AT CLOSE QUAETEES 



these private matters. I say, in our day. We 
are all of us more or less subtle nowadays. If 
we have a little time, we can make out a case for 
almost any attitude we choose to take up. It is 
a real danger besetting every one of us that we 
raise questions and even indulge our question- 
ing spirit, not with the view of doing something 
with the results of our inquiries ; but either as a 
mere indulgence like any other self-indulgence, 
or with the view of confirming ourselves in some 
moral relaxation or secret declension to which 
we are becoming disposed. 

Now, it is a great thing to get into our mind 
that the whole purpose of thought is action. 
Thought without action is, in fact, a vice. A 
man is not to be said to be thinking of his duty 
who is really trying to find reasons for not doing 
his duty. A man is not to be said to be think- 
ing profoundly about life and about God who 
is really only encouraging within himself the 
spirit of dilettantism and hesitation. Thought 
is not thought unless it contributes to our 
force and manhood. Thought is not thought 
when it results in mere impotence, in the 
mere balancing of reasons for and against. 
I am speaking just now, of course, of thought in 
relation to the ultimate matters of life and faith. 
I shall not spend my time with you getting to- 
gether reasons for not believing or for not living 
to the height of my own purest insight. If, as we 



CUEE OF QUESTIONING SPIEIT 241 



confer upon serious things, we seem to arrive 
at a sinister and disabling conclusion, I shall, 
if I am wise, reject it at once and even when I 
can give you no logical reason for rejecting it. 
I shall reject it in obedience to my whole per- 
sonality, in obedience to the demand of the more 
generous faculties of my nature, — to the demand 
of my heart, of my moral will, of my inherited 
sense of God and of that within me implanted 
in me by the Author of my being which tells me 
that life is a facing of odds and that the way of 
life is a narrow way, that the glory of man lies 
in the line of some heartily chosen risk. 

All this comes to me as I ponder these words 
of Scripture : ' 4 and no man after that durst ask 
Him any question." 

There is a whole class and quality of ques- 
tions which simply die in the Presence of Jesus 
Christ. They die of shame. All questions that 
have even a touch of anger or bitterness die 
thus; for where there is anger or bitterness, 
there must have been self-seeking, and face to 
face with the Man of Gethsemane and Calvary 
such questions are altogether out of place. If 
questions of that kind still survive within you 
in the Presence of Jesus Christ, then there is 
something more seriously wrong with you than 
the thing you came to consult Him about. You 
are like one who consults his physician about 
some slight pain or some troublesome ailment 



242 



AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



which is irritating bat not serious ; and who per- 
ceives in the face of his physician a look which 
signifies that the trifling pain is a symptom of 
a graver malady. 

And there I have, almost without intending it, 
described another process by which in the Pres- 
ence of Christ our questionings die away. After 
all, it is only about things which at least stop 
short of absolute and final importance, that we 
in this life raise questions. When we come face 
to face with reality, the questioning spirit within 
us is silenced. Then our soul seeks another 
solace, — either in faith or in action, and faith 
itself is a kind of action. In the real moments 
of our life, we do not ifik gnestions. In the real 
moments we live by faculties, earlier, deeper, 
simpler, more tremendous than the reason. We 
take action as when we plunge into the sea to 
save a drowning child. Or we pray, knowing 
that some matter on which it may be we had 
planned and vexed ourselves, has now gone be- 
yond us, so that either we have God or are 
without help, and in that moment of absolute 
necessity we feel that we indeed have God. 

There are whole classes and levels of question- 
ing which disappear or are chased away as 
clouds are chased away the moment you bring 
Jesus Christ upon the scene. And this because 
of His Goodness, because of His moral Great- 
ness, because of the quality of Him. A good 



CUEE OF QUESTIONING SPIRIT 243 



man even within our human degree of goodness 
gives an answer and gives the only useful an- 
swer to many questions. Sometimes we ask 
ourselves — it is usually in some hour when we 
have been used harshly by the world — we ask 
ourselves whether there is such a thing as real 
goodness anywhere. We may become so head- 
long and self-indulgent in our distress as to ask 
ourselves whether there is a God or whether 
the whole fabric of religion is not the pitiable 
work of man to deceive himself. Well, I cannot 
hinder you, I cannot hinder myself, from asking 
such questions and saying these wild things. 
But here is what I wish to say ; and if you con- 
sider it deeply I believe it will prove a swift and 
blessed way back from all moral impatience and 
the spirit of denial. It is this. Whenever you 
are driven by your own moods or fortunes to put 
angry questions to the very roots of life, do not 
put your questions to yourself ; do not put them 
even to some very good soul whom you know, — 
though it is worth your pondering that you will 
not wish to say such things to one who believes 
greatly and lives beautifully with God. Ask 
your angry, denying, questions of Christ Him- 
self. Do not ask me whether it is worth a man's 
while contending for the highest in this wretched 
scrambling world. Ask Christ that question. 
Do not ask me if there is a God at all, and if 
there be, how He can allow this and that to 



244 AT CLOSE QUAKTEES 



happen. Do not ask me. Put these questions to 
J esus Christ, — if you have the heart to put them. 
And if you have not the heart to put them, be 
silent. You are already answered when your 
heart withdraws ; and you are answered in terms 
of faith. 

When we stand before Christ with our ques- 
tions — it will depend upon the depth and reality 
of them what answer He will make. If they are 
idle questions, careless, self-indulgent, arising 
from our own petulance or vanity, He will prob- 
ably not answer us in words. 

But it may be some final question, touched 
with your own blood, wrung from you by the 
death of a child or by the ruin of the hope of a 
lifetime, — how can God be God and I so suffer? 
— it may be a question of that depth that takes 
you to the feet of Christ. Again He may not an- 
swer in the language of the Schools. He may not 
answer in words at all. He Himself, with His 
suffering, with His Cross, will be the answer. 
And your heart of hearts will accept it and be 
satisfied. You will see your sorrow joining 
itself to His sorrow, your loneliness sheltering 
itself in His perfect Confidence in God : 1 ' let 
not your heart be troubled; believe in God, be- 
lieve in Me." " In the world ye shall have 
tribulations, but be of good cheer. I have over- 
come the world. 9 ' 

Once upon a time a little company of broken- 



CURE OF QUESTIONING SPIRIT 245 



hearted people were met together in an upper 
room. They were all of them sad : some of them 
so sad that they spoke bitterly ; some of them so 
sad that they were past speaking. 

' 1 And Jesus stood in the midst and saith unto 
them, Peace be unto you. And when He had 
said thus, He showed them His hands and His 
side. ' ' Then were the disciples glad when they 
saw the Lord. It was as if He had said, ' ' What, 
could ye not watch with me one hour? " 



XXIV 



THE RELATION BETWEEN THE LIFE 
WE LEAD AND THE FAITH WE HOLD 

"Holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord." Heb. 
xii: 14. 

THE idea underlying these words of Scrip- 
ture is one which is always insisted upon 
in the Bible. Eightly considered, it is the con- 
clusion of the whole matter. We see in life 
precisely what we are looking for. Life be- 
comes for each of us just what we take it 
to be. 

More than once did our Lord give expres- 
sion to this truth on its brighter side, as, for 
example, when He said, " If any man will do 
God's will, he shall know of the doctrine 
whether it is of God — which is His support 
of the great saying of the Old Testament, that 
" the pathway of the just is as a shining light 
that shineth more and more unto the perfect 
day." 

In both of these utterances a law is unveiled, 
a very solemn law; for it seems to leave us so 
free and, therefore, so responsible. That law 
is, that life comes to mean what a man takes 

246 



LIFE AND FAITH 247 



it to mean; that our ways of living gradually 
bring about a certain way of looking at things, 
a certain way of believing; that our manner of 
life determines our faith. Let a man live for 
the Highest and the Highest will become for 
that man the Eeal and True. Let a man live 
as seeing Christ Who is invisible, and the in- 
visible Christ will become for that man as real 
and personal as his own soul. Let a man in all 
his personal decisions assert to himself that 
God is and that his great business is with God, 
and henceforth for that man nothing is com- 
mon or indifferent. Every day of his life sup- 
plies to him a test and an opportunity. 

But it is not only on its brighter side that 
the Scriptures affirm and illustrate the truth 
that life becomes what you insist it shall be. 
On the darker side the same law holds and 
rules. If we live for the day, we shall have no 
great prospect beyond the day. If we live for 
our pleasures only, the soul within us will die. 
"Where our treasure is there will our heart be 
also. 

A man is practically without God who 
is not living for some ideal which contradicts 
and crucifies and transfigures his daily life. 
They only believe in the future, in the unseen, 
in God, who stand committed to such a life as 
requires those great beliefs for its justification 
and fulfilment. We believe only in those things 



248 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



for which our heart and flesh cry out. Faith, 
like love, like hope, like every spirit which re- 
deems, — faith is an agony. 

The most powerful statement in Holy Scrip- 
ture of the darker side of this truth which is 
engaging us is contained in the first chapter 
of S. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. I cannot 
go into it just now except to say that the whole 
burden of that chapter is simply this, — that life 
becomes for each of us what we had been taking 
it to be. The terrible penalty for sin, says the 
Apostle there, is not the pain it brings in the 
way of retribution. For indeed all pain has a 
tendency to purge: all retribution is merciful 
and indeed loving. Xo : the terrible penalty of 
our sin is — its consequences. The loss it brings 
to us — the narrow life, the darkened conscience, 
the ability to be satisfied with the life of the 
senses, the dying out of the soul, the awful re- 
treat and final departure of the very faculty 
by which we know ourselves to be something 
other than the brute that perisheth. That in 
S. Paul's view is the wages of sin — not pun- 
ishment, but death. And so, in that chapter, 
speaking of the consequences of wrong ways of 
living, he uses such phrases as these: " men," 
he says, " received in themselves that recom- 
pense of their error which was due." And again 
" even as they refused to have God in their 
knowledge, God gave them up to a reprobate 



LIFE AND FAITH 249 



mind, to do those things which are not con- 
venient.' ' 

And again he says that by persisting in 
their evil courses men become ' ' past feeling." 
They lose even their natural affection, and at 
last become not merely ignorant of God, but 
actually " haters of God." 

And in the Ephesian Epistle the same 
thought is weighing upon his mind — that the 
effect of men's wrong ways of living is that it 
lowers all their lights and shuts them up in 
darkness — ' ' men who walk in the vanity of 
their mind become darkened in their under- 
standing (in their perceptions) and alienated 
from the life of God. ' ' 

So much then for the express teaching of the 
Bible, and now let us try to take home to our 
breasts this momentous principle. 

The principle would seem to be that our 
faith — our view of life, of God and man and 
all things, is influenced, is deflected or con- 
firmed, by our innumerable acts of personal 
choice. 

Every man judges the value of all life by 
the value he puts upon human life, and he forms 
his opinion of the value of human life from 
what he knows about his own life. There we 
are not far from the saying that " man is the 
measure of all things." If our own life has no 
supreme motive, no compelling inspiration, if 



250 AT CLOSE QUAKTEKS 



our soul is only a kind of public boarding- 
house where people come and go, who have no 
sentiment for the place and for whom the place 
has no sentiment; if our soul is only a stage or 
platform where first one actor and then another 
comes and plays a part and says his say, hav- 
ing amused us or occupied us for the moment ; 
if our own life is an incoherent thing like that, 
a medley of blind impulses and momentary de- 
sires and moods, we shall never be able to rise 
to any high and unifying conception of the 
whole scheme of human experience. A life 
which itself is empty of all serious content 
cannot but find this world an empty and 
futile place. But on the other hand and by the 
working of the self-same law, whosoever fills 
his own life with things of permanent value, 
whosoever pursues ideals and holds himself 
daily as responsible for loyalty to some obscure 
but determined code of honour or call of God, 
cannot but believe that the things which he is 
contending for are being contended for on some 
immense scale, that this one poor impulse of 
his is no solitary and ineffectual thing, but is 
rather the throb and pulse of the very heart of 
things. This whole life of ours is like a well- 
painted portrait. When you look at it, its eyes 
seem fixed upon you. And, as is the case with 
the very greatest portraits, say that of Mona 
Lisa, those eyes look back upon you with a re- 



LIFE AND FAITH 251 



flection or response which varies with the deep- 
est secret of your soul. The eyes of Mona 
Lisa could encourage a man to anything — to 
fling away his soul in folly or to be nailed to a 
cross to win for one moment their approval. 
So is it with the whole face of things in which 
are set the eyes of God. There is a sense in 
which you can make anything you like of this 
life. You can choose your way, and thereby 
decide your faith, decide the atmosphere of 
your soul. And as you go on, on the way which 
you have chosen, you will come upon many 
things which encourage you to go further. 

Let a man live by his sensual appetites, and 
immediately many things in life hasten to assist 
him and to approve his course. 

Ah, but let a man take up life seriously, 
hearkening to its finer calls, paying heed to 
such checks and misgivings and entreaties of 
the Spirit as he is aware of, guiding himself 
by the very eye of God, and to him also come 
wonderful encouragements and approvals, and 
an increasing confidence in life's holy purpose. 
Yielding himself to God, he will see God — and 
that more and more. 

This is the infinite compensation for obedi- 
ence to God in Jesus Christ, — we see our way, 
we are delivered from the torment of misgiving. 
Something is settled and well settled within 
us, and upon it as upon a centre our soul re- 



252 AT CLOSE QUARTERS 



covers its peace and elasticity and good cheer. 
The darkest night is full of twinkling lamps 
for faithful voyagers. They have the peace of 
God. 

It was a saving of one of the early Fathers 
that God has so ordered things that they are 
full of darkness and silence to unbelievers and 
to light-minded people; but luminous enough 
for all who are sincere. It is a great truth and 
touches the heart of all truth. We see into the 
things of God as we obey. There is no way of 
filling up the gulf, the break, in the evidence 
between faith and the verification or assurance 
of faith, except by putting ourselves into the 
breach. Concerning the things of God, they 
only are in the secret who are labouring at the 
work. In the things of God the mere spectators 
see nothing. They conclude that all is vanity : 
for, alas! they know that their own life is a 
vanity. They impute themselves. 

But no man ever served a cause with a heart 
purged of mere self-seeking, no man ever suf- 
fered for a cause in which he could lift up his 
face to God without spot, who did not feel and 
know that the stars in their courses were fight- 
ing for him, that he and his cause had allies 
beyond time. 

May God give unto us this fidelity, that there 
may descend upon our hearts this peace. Amen. 

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illustrations, generalizations and deductions all welded to- 
gether into a crisp, straightforward narration of absorbing 
interest. It might very properly be called an encyclopedic 
handbook on the subject of Immigation, 

CHARLES STELZLE 

The Gospel of Labor 

i2mo, cloth, net 50c. 

This volume of talks to working men is characteristic of 
the author of "Letters From a Workingman." Dr. Stelzle 
is rightly called "The Apostle of the American Laborer." 
Once a workingman himself he knows just how to reach the 
men of this class. The sympathy and understanding of like 
experiences inform his addresses and carry the message home 
to the heart. 

PROFESSOR JAMES R. HO WERT ON 

The Church and Social Reform 

l2mo, cloth, net 75c. 

This compact little volume on Christianity and social con- 
ditions presents the subject in three sections: First, "The 
Church and Revolutions of the Past"; Second, "The Causes 
of the Present Social Crisis"; Third, "The Church and 
Social Reforms of To-day." The student of social conditions 
will find here a very clear and satisfactory historical state- 
ment, a graphic analysis of the causes of the present discon- 
tent and a rationale of alleviation that will arouse discussion 
and open the eyes of Christian citizens to their duty in the 
present crisis. 



YOUNG MEN 



JOHN DOUGLAS ADAM, P.P. 

Letters of Father and Son During a 

College Course i2mo, cloth, net $1.00. 

In twenty-tour chapters life's great problems are discussed 
with freedom and insight. Study, recreation, friends, use of 
time, money, health, speech, thought, influence, religion, 
trouble, optimism and character are some of the subjects 
treated. * 



